Restoring A Vintage Computer And Its Plotter

Repairing vintage computers is bread-and-butter for many of us around here. The machines themselves tend to be fairly fixable, assuming spare parts are available and there hasn’t been too much physical damage. Peripherals can be another matter, though. Since they interface with the real world they can have more esoteric problems that aren’t always solvable. [joekutz] was handed just such a device in the form of a CE-150 docking station for a Sharp PC1500 Pocket Computer, which has a plotter built in. Here’s his “tip” for getting plotters like these working again.

The first step here is to disassemble the original, dried out pens to scavenge a few of the parts. The outer case needs to be kept so that it can be put back into the plotter, and a small O-ring is saved as well. To replace the dried-out tips [joekutz] discards the original tips and replaces them with tips from a common ink pen, using shrink wrap tubing to help fit the pen’s tip into the original plotter cylinder. He also takes the ink from the pen to fill the plotter’s cartridge, completing the surgery on the multi-colored plotter and bringing it back to life.

Of course this build goes well beyond the plotter, including bringing the PC1500 back to life as well. There are a few other videos about this project covering that original restoration as well as demonstrating some of the quirks of how this computer is meant to be programmed. But we mostly focused on the plotter here since that is a little bit out of the ordinary, and we’re also sure that refilling ink cartridges of any sort gets under the skin of everyone at HP.

Continue reading “Restoring A Vintage Computer And Its Plotter”

This Hack Can Refill Your Stratasys 3D Printer

[Dan] has his own Stratasys Dimension SST 768 3D printer. It’s a professional grade machine which does an amazing job. But when it comes time to replace the cartridge he has to pay the piper to the tune of $260. He can buy ABS filament for about $50 per kilogram, so he set out to refill his own P400 cartridges.

Respooling the cartridge must be quite easy because he doesn’t describe the process at all. But the physical act of refilling it doesn’t mean you can keep using it. The cartridge and the printer both store usage information that prevents this type of DIY refill; there’s an EEPROM in the cartridge and a log file on the printer’s hard drive. [Dan] pulled the hard drive out and used a Live CD to make an image. He loaded the image in a virtual machine, made some changes to enable SSH and zap the log file at each boot, then loaded the image back onto the printer’s drive. A script that he wrote is able to backup and rewrite the EEPROM chip, which basically rolls back the ‘odometer’ on how much filament has been used.

[Image Source]

(mini)How-To: Refill Your DTG Inks

The number one and number two things asked after presentation of our DIYDTG were…
“How does it hold up in the wash?”
and…
“How did you change out the inks?”
While we’ve explained the first several times (regular ink washes out, DTG ink gets a little lighter but survives) we can hopefully answer the second with a tutorial.

Continue reading “(mini)How-To: Refill Your DTG Inks”