US Patent 7722147 Printing system architecture

Systems and techniques for printing on a workpiece. In one implementation, a print system has a collection of print elements arranged to span a print area, a workpiece conveyor to move a workpiece through the print area, and a detector to detect a position of the workpiece in the print area. The print system also has control electronics to instruct the collection of print elements to print an image on the workpiece substantially immediately when the collection of print elements receive the instruction through an optical communication path.