I recently bought an old Brother laserjet for 100 bucks off Craigslist.
The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine.
The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...
I have a Ethernet only Epson WP4515 that I plan to keep until it dies since it works perfectly with 3rd party cartridges. In order to add WiFi, years ago I took a TP-Link TL-MR3020 mini router I got for €5 at a flea market, put OpenWRT into it and set it up as a wireless bridge. Worked perfectly for years until I could finally put the printer in a place to connect it through Ethernet.
Any piece of hardware with the necessary features (compatible with OpenWRT or any other Linux, Ethernet, WiFi) can be used, therefore many *Pi-like boards will also work, but repurposing an old router/AP will be the cheapest solution since they're often literally thrown away.
A RaspberryPi sharing the printer over the network would do the trick. Stick it to the back of the printer, the LAN port connected to it, while sharing overthe WiFi.
It works for 3D printing with OctoPi, it should work with 2d printers with Samba.
Do you need it to be available over wireless for direct printing, or just on the network without making holes? If it's the latter, are you aware of Ethernet over power (aka powerline networking)?
The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine.
The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...