Re-Using The LCD & Button Assembly From A Broken Inkjet Printer

September 11, 2014 by Rich Bremer 22 Comments

Inkjet printers are a dime a dozen. You probably have taken old printers apart to scavenge parts like motors, pulleys, belts, switches, linear rods, power supply, etc. These parts are easy to reuse in other projects, unlike the controller portion of the printer which not as easy to make use of. [Blaupause] has done something very interesting, and it probably ranks in the ‘extreme difficulty’ category for most tinkerers. He has taken the front panel off an otherwise non-working Canon Pixma inkjet printer and has figured out a way to interface with it.

The front panel of this printer has the standard buttons that you would find on any ole printer, but the Pixmas also has a small LCD screen. [Blaupause] has written a library for the Olimexino microcontroller that can communicate with and make use of the repurposed front panel. And the neat part of this project is that the front panel’s on-board processor does the heavy lifting when it comes to displaying images on the LCD screen or checking button states which frees up your microcontroller to do whatever else. Right now, the LCD screen can display bitmaps and supports image transparency. The library can not display video as of yet, but that option is being worked on.

[Blaupause] makes all his hard work available to the public on the project’s Sourceforge page. In addition to the library, he also includes printer panel pinouts and detailed information on how to communicate with the buttons and LCD screen. Video after the break…

Continue reading “Re-Using The LCD & Button Assembly From A Broken Inkjet Printer” →

Etch Aluminum Control Panels

August 19, 2009 by Mikey Sklar 11 Comments

This clever Instructable demonstrates how to etch beautiful aluminum control panels for electronics projects. We like how similar this process is to DIY circuit board etching. Both abide by the same technique and use blue transfer paper. The primary difference is in the use of muriatic acid and hydrogen peroxide for etching aluminum.

Bluetooth Motorcycle Control Panel With Arduino

June 14, 2009 by Gerrit Coetzee 39 Comments

Motorcycle_in_neutral

[Bill2009] has made some nice progress on a control panel for his motorcycle over at the arduino.cc forums. It can show speed, tachometer readings for the wheel and engine, as well as indicate the current gear. He reads the square wave coming off of his tachometer input and pulses from a reed switch mounted on the wheel to calculate all this. To top it all off he can monitor the data via a Bluetooth module attached to the board, which is much better than trying to balance a laptop on your knees while cruising down the highway. He is working on getting the size down so that he can mount the whole assembly inside of his motorcycle. He also plans to add new software features like wind resistance calculations and0 to 60mph timing.