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Where's my loggery?

A project log for The Artist--Printze

What wonders can be achieved with a 30y/o Bubble-Jet?

eric-hertzEric Hertz 08/19/2021 at 05:240 Comments

Printze was a months-long project... Where're all my logs?

Off the tlp of my head:

Goopy-vias from blown caps was an early thing, fixed...

Blown transistors, replaced...

Once functioning, a little alcohol revived 20+year-old ink heads.

Injected ink from a newer cartridge from a different brand.

A few heads did not revive. Turned out one "row" and one "column" were dead, an electrical thing beyond my repair.

Still had 48 nozzles functioning, so revised the linux printer driver to use only those.

Promptly thereafter discovered that "new"/refurb cartridges still exist, and are cheap. Ordered two.

Began hackery at the printer-control-language level.

Discovered it can traverse both up and down the page, can print a single letter at a time, eventually taught it a little bit of HPGL, printing individual droplets one by one kinda like a pen-plotter moving across the paper.

Surely more I'm forgetting...

Had some groovy ideas of a game kinda like pictionary, where it prints out randomly on the page until someone guesses the image.

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