printer

Separating a working scanner from its broken printer

April 11, 2012 by 13 Comments

The laser printer portion of this all-in-one machine gave up the ghost and [Entropia] couldn’t get it working again. But the scanner was still functioning so he decided to separate the scanner from its dead printer module.

The model in question is a Samsung SCX-4200. The design is actually perfect for separation because the scanner sits on top of the out feed tray of the printer. It can even be lifted to allow more room for printed pages to pile up. All he has to do is separate the hinged connector and reroute the flat cables. But the real question in [Entropia’s] mind was whether or not the control board would work without the laser printer components connected to it.

He carefully disassembled the unit, spilling toner here and there which is left over from a catastrophic knock-off toner cartridge incident. A quick test showed him that although the drivers complain that the paper tray is open, the scanner does still work. He glued the controller board seen on the left to the bottom of the scanner enclosure, and added some felt feet. Now his scanner is closer to the size you’d expect. And on the plus side he gained a geared stepper motor, laser scanning unit, exhaust fan, and a couple of solenoids to use in future projects.

Resetting the page count on a laser printer

March 5, 2012 by 77 Comments

[Brian] really liked his Samsung color laser printer right up until it was time to replace the toner cartridges. A full set of toner cartridges sell for about the same price as the printer itself, so [Brian] figured he could simply refill the toner in the cartridges he already has. The printer sends out the ‘low toner’ warning  based on page count and won’t print if the page count is too high, negating the economy of a toner refill kit. Luckily, [Brian] figured out a dead simple way to reset the page count so he can use those third-party refill kits.

All the configuration settings and page counts for the printer are stored on an I2C EEPROM. After dumping the data held on this EEPROM with an Arduino and sniffing everything going into the EEPROM with a Bus Pirate, [Brian] was nearly at his wit’s end. Thankfully, serendipity intervened. When [Brian] restarted the printer with the Bus Pirate attached, he noticed it took much longer to initialize. Printing a configuration report, he was trilled to see that all page counts have been zeroed.

The final hack that allows [Brian] to reset the page count and used refilled toner cartridges is a simple wire that ties the SDA line of the EEPROM to ground on boot. [Brian] used a momentary switch, but given this is a once-every-few-months operation, a simple wire would suffice. Check out [Brian]’s page reset demo after the break.

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Weapon of mass graffiti

January 31, 2012 by 48 Comments

What uses a fire extinguisher, a bike pump, and provides hours of probation, community service, and possibly jail time? If you said an automatic graffiti writer you’re correct! [Olivier van Herpt] calls this little job the Time Writer. We call it defacing property… but tomato, tomahto.

Details are a bit scarce, but you get a fine overview of the system from the video after the break. [Olivier] tagged the post as Arduino; it’s obviously running the dot matrix printer made up of seven solenoid valves on a metal rod. These are fed ink via a tube connected to a fire extinguisher which serves as the reservoir. The bike pump is used to pressurize the enclosure so that a pump isn’t necessary when out and about.

Obviously you shouldn’t try this at home, but let’s talk about possible improvements as an academic exercise. First off the mix of the ink/paint needs to be reigned in to get rid of the dripping. We’d also like to see the inclusion of some proper spray can nozzles to tidy up the results. That, paired with an IMU board should be able to smooth out the printed designs.

This might make an interesting add-on to that rainbow graffiti writer.

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Simple low toner workaround squeezes out a few extra pages when your printer refuses

November 22, 2011 by 72 Comments

low-ink-hacking

[Andrew] was getting ready to print out an assignment when his Samsung printer suddenly started blinking a red error light at him. Unable to find any documentation explaining the issue, he called Samsung directly and found that it was indicating the toner cartridge was nearly empty.

He held down the button that prints a test page, which came out just fine despite the printer’s insistence that there was not enough toner left. Annoyed at the fact that he felt Samsung was trying to strong arm him into buying another pricey toner cartridge, he looked for a way around the restriction.

He discovered that his printer’s software allowed him to specify a custom test page document, though it required that the document be in PostScript format. After a few shell commands, he had his document converted and was on to bigger and better things.

While a bit time consuming, his workaround should let him get by on this toner cartridge at least for a little while longer. We imagine that since he’s using Linux, the process could probably be scripted to save time, though we’re not sure if the same can be said for Windows-based PCs.

Baking an HP LaserJet 1522 Series back to life

October 19, 2011 by 48 Comments

resurrecting_hp_laserjet

[Thice] had himself a problem. As luck would have it his HP laser printer died shortly after the warranty period expired, and HP was ready to charge him €350 to repair it. Since that would pretty much buy [Thice] a new one, he decided to try fixing the problem himself. He scoured the Internet for a solution to his problem, and luckily discovered that his printer might be recoverable.

The entire LaserJet M1522 series is apparently pretty prone to breaking, with the formatter board being the usual point of failure. To fix his printer, he disassembled the outer shell, removing the formatter board from the unit. Once the onboard battery was removed, he constructed a set of standoffs using aluminum foil, and set the board in his oven at 180°C (~356°F) for about eight minutes.

After cooling, he reinstalled the board, and his printer behaved as good as new. [Thice] says that the only problem with his fix is that he needs to bake the board every 6 months or so, making this a great hack but not the most ideal solution in the long term.

Modding an inkjet for PCB production

October 17, 2011 by 47 Comments

Like all of us, [Ryan] is tired of waiting for board production houses. To reduce some of that turnaround time, he modded an Epson inkjet into a PCB printer. The Instructable of his build is extremely thorough and it looks like he’s getting some quality boards out of his project

The build started off by disassembling an Epson C86 printer he had lying around the house. Going with an Epson printer is important – Epsons have a piezo print head accepts ink that would clog other printers. After tearing all the plastic off his printer, [Ryan] set to work raising the printer (or lowering the bed, whatever) and was off to the races.

The cartridges were filled with etch-resistant yellow ink and a piece of copper clad put onto the printer. After printing, [Ryan] etched his board in ferric chloride. Sadly, he’s getting small pinholes in his traces where a bit of the ink was eaten during etching. He’s tried HCl and Peroxide, but those turn his boards into green junk.

If you’ve got any tips to help [Ryan] out, leave them in the comments. Before that, check out the printing demo [Ryan] put up.

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Spamming a label printer with #cookiehammer

October 1, 2011 by 18 Comments

[John] has always loved stock ticker machines. These machines are highly collectible, so short of finding one that wasn’t hurled from a Manhattan skyscraper in 1929, a stock ticker is out of reach for the casual enthusiast. There is another way to get a stock ticker-like device though: hack a label printer to print out stuff from Twitter.

The build is really quite simple. A Dymo thermal label printer was modified to accept standard 2.25″ point of sale receipt paper. Now that the printer can shoot out line after line of text, [John] wrote a little bit of Ruby code using a Twitter API, RMagick for graphics processing and a Dymo printer driver.

Every 30 seconds, the code does a Twitter search for a specific hashtag and prints those tweets. #cookiehammer was the first thing that came to mind, so it stuck. Right now there’s a few tweets for #cookiehammer, but we expect [John] will have to put a new roll of paper in his printer fairly soon.

It may not be as informative as a stock ticker machine, but we think [John]’s twitter printer build sure beats watching CNN. Check out the walk through after the break.

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