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Picked up another printer off trademe

I havent documented all that has happened yet, but lets just say I broke the first printer, bought another one. Turns out it didnt use the right inks so it was just washing off whatever I printed onto despite heatgunning it to hell and back.

So I have another C63. I will probabrly use parts from this one to fix up the one I broke, But its at tech at the moment since I was getting sick of going to the labs to print and it fits into my desks cabinet (just)

I am waiting on a render for a tech presenetaion at the moment, and wont really have any free time till after monday.

Tech has made us use vox for our blog on the project this semester.

Mine is unimaginatively called http://richms.vox.com/

I will see about getting a subscription from there to feed back into here, but at this stage I am more worried about other things.

I got the $5 inkjet from trademe today.

It was listed as having a blocked nozzle so should be fine with a clean. I was expecting the worst and that it would be totally screwed but at least give me a platform to work on. When I powered it up there was a flashing light. No idea what It means since it just has a cryptic symbol by it.

Plugged it into a PC, installed the drivers and did a nozzle check.

Here’s the result:

One blocked nozzle - and its the blue which isn’t needed for the PCB work since that uses magenta and yellow (better resistance when etching).

Showing the cartridge area open

Printer itself and the mystery light

I couldn’t clean it since the black is almost empty, but it doesn’t really matter anyway.

So anyway, next up is to rip into it and get rid of all that useless plastic and see what really makes it tick inside. Stay tuned for part 3…

Introduction

A few days ago I ran across the following link

http://techref.massmind.org/techref/pcb/etch/directinkjetresist.htm

It details some hacked inkjet printers and the way people use them to make their own printed circuit boards at home.

(http://techref.massmind.org/techref/pcb/etch/c84-st.htm)

The linked forum at http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30951 is good reading too, with impressive results.

Well, I have previously thought about doing the toner transfer method, but my laser printer has problems with coverage being that it cost me virtually nothing (with the amount it has done its virtually paid me to have it) - So the idea of using an inkjet direct to the board is appealing.

The first obstacle is Epson stupid naming conventions, instead of having the same name for the same printer all over the world, they give them different names - eg the Epson Stylus Photo R220 in the USA, and Epson Stylus Photo R230 in Australasia - despite (well to me at least) appearing to be exactly the same printer.

The ink required is an aftermarket replacement for the Epson Durabrite ink, the yellow MISPRO ink - so I did what any self respecting New Zealander would do, I looked on Trademe for cheap printers that are compatible with the durabrite inks.

I have bids in on several that are durabrite compatible

• A Stylus C67
• A Stylus Photo R210
• And a Stylus c63

Will hopefully win at least one of them, or more since I can guarantee that the first one will end up in the wheely-bin.

Getting a way of making PCBs will allow me to resume on a couple of stagnent projects I am playing around with. At the moment they are all packed away in the shed in a wheely-storer.

PCB design.

I cant remeber where I saw the link to it, but I have downloaded the open source PCB package called kiCad - I have installed it but not really done anything with it (yet)

I will put another blog post up with the list of outstanding projects and the order of priority of them. I am still short a digital camera so things will be a bit picture light here for a while.

Will have a play with this before the next post.

Well, finally its over for the year.

No plans yet but we shall see.

I am giving windows live writer a shot to see how it goes, like it so far…

I have made a myminicity for my site

Please click onto http://richms.com.myminicity.com/ to help the population along.