January 23, 2026
Description
💻 Over the last weeks I became a huge fan of Paperless-ngx and I am currently beginning to scan all my mountains of A4 paper folders to have them in the most parts digital only. Over the years this paper archive storage has filled 2 complete cabinets and it keeps getting more…
📧 In addition new documents from insurance companies and others you get now mostly as digital .PDF files which I don’t want to print out again to store them as A4 papers as well… It just feels wrong and wired to do so. And I don’t want to have 2 archives too… Many documents like invoices you get via email come as .PDF only too…
🧰 Lately I converted all my smart home services to Docker containers and came across Paperless-ngx and tried it out. For me it is the perfect solution to get rid of the paper mountain and store the new .PDF files in the same way and have most of the documents digitized only to save space and become able to search within these documents all in the same place. It just makes sense to me and should reduce this papers archive about 95% by just keeping the most important pages of contracts and so still on paper too.
In addition Paperless-ngx can directly extract .PDF documents from emails and so make the build of this new archive even more powerful and easy.
⚙ So I got myself a new Epson WorkForce ES-580W scanner which is way faster to use than my old flat bed scanner attached to my laser printer. This new scanner is super fast and does handle up to 50 pages of double sided paper at once - handsfree… Simply activate the samba network share option in Paperless-ngx “consume” folder and add a scan destination on your network scanner to this shared folder to integrate the scanner into Paperless-ngx.
😎 Because you don’t want to end up place each and every document separately into the scanner the Paperless-ngx solution can handle QR with specific ArchiveSerialNumbers (ASN) to split separate documents from another. So when you remove metal paper clips before scanning you just need to add such a QR code sticker to the first page of a document and the rest is done automatically. Within Paperless-ngx you then get an additional field filled with the ASN code number and can always find the corresponding paper again more quickly before you shred all this paper into the paper waste bucket…
🛠 So I created myself some good readable and easy to print and stick on ASN QR code sticker sheets with their online serial print tool which I need to stick on the to scan documents before scanning them. This added some pages of stickers you don’t want to lose or get damaged because you will need them.
💡 So why not use our trusty 3D printer to create an A4 sheet QR code holder for these ASN QR codes which will last the next years of using this archive solution? =)
😁 This is where this model comes into the game and it will store about 10mm in height of such A4 QR codes which in my case are are more then 1000 ASN codes which will be more then enough to have on hand while feeding the scanner…
16x M3x12 cylinder screws
16x M3 nuts
0.28 draft profile
No supports needed
Brim set active to avoid warping. As you can see the print bed of my Prusa Core One + is kind of fully used ;-)
To get the texts in a different color add a color change to the top part after about 1mm print height and after about 2.4mm again to the desired color. To read how such a color change is done, you will find a really good article here. See pictures from Prusa Slicer for details.
⚠ IMPORTANT: ⚠ The M3 nuts are added to the 2 front parts during printing at about 7.5mm print height as shown in the pictures. See pictures from Prusa Slicer for details. Use an M3 screw to place them flat into the print. The space between the nuts and the nozzle is more then enough when you insert the nuts flat as shown in the pictures:
Happy printing and happy scanning =)
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution — Noncommercial
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