Tutorial: Use an Old Inkjet Printer to Learn Servo Motor Control With EMC2 – Part 2 madpenguin.ca /blog/201 /blog/2011/06/14/tu 1/06/14/tutorial-use-an-old-in torial-use-an-old-inkjet-printer-to-learn kjet-printer-to-learn-servo-motor-contro -servo-motor-controllwith-emc2-part-2-2/ madpenguin
Printer Carcass Ready For Use
Continued from Part 1 So you’d like to play with servo motor control would you? Well hopefully you’ve come to the right place and we’ll actually be able to learn you a thing or two. In this next segment we’re going to learn about some of the internals of an old inkjet printer and how to recycle it to serve our purposes. The focus of this series is around setting up a small servo control lab or test bench so you can play with a DC servo motor on a relatively safe and inexpensive mechanism before you move on to more ri sky setups. That isn’t to say that the mechanisms you work with here won’t be useful in other ways. On the contrary! Depending on what it is you want to do, these consumer-grade electromechanical electromechanical marvels may be just the ticket for some light weight applications. So far I’ve torn apart several inkjet i nkjet printers and they’ve all shared the same type of print-head mechanism based on a small brushed DC motor and linear encoder, so just about any should do the trick. For your reference, the following are the models that I can definitely say have the bits we need, although some of the mechanical and electronic details may vary from model to model.
Epson Stylus C86 HP Deskjet F335 All-in-One Lexmark X2470 Dell 810 HP psc 1350 All-in-One Here I’ll be detailing what I did with the Epson Stylus C86, but the principals should apply to just about every other model out there.
Our Goals – Where are we going today? Basically our goals are three-fold: 1) Salvage a servo mechanism including brushed DC motor, power transmission (in the form of a toothed belt and it’s support hardware), the print head or “load”, linear guides for the print head travel and encoder device. 2) Remove as much of the extras in the printer as possible while still leaving the above items intact. You may or may not be removing things like the logic board, power supply pinch rollers, print cartridges, other ribbon cables and sensors. 3) Trace some signals so we can determine how to get what we need out of the remaining electronics.
Motor, Gears and Rotary Encoder Wheel
I’ll be focusing on the linear servo-mechanism that moves the print head from side-to-side. Virtually all inkjet printers use this type of mechanism to move the print head from side to side, however you may find some printers have a servo-driven paper feed mechanism with a rotary encoder as well. This is even more straight-forward to integrate as you don’t have to worry about damaging the mechanism since there’s no end-stop to jam against. Most of the things I discuss here will apply to rotary mechanisms also, so you might want to start with a rotary servo as it’s more forgiving than the linear print-head mechanism.
Voiding the Warranty – What’s under the hood? So the first step is to get into the beast. With the Epson C86 this was surprisingly quick and easy with a minimum of tools as all the panels are snapped in place with retaining tabs. Use a flat-blade screwdriver where needed to pop the tabs and remove panels. Other printers run the spectrum from standard #2 Phillips screws to the slightly more esoteric T-10 Torx and I’m sure there’s someone who’s putting these together with security screws of one or two flavours. Do what you need to to carefully disassemble the printer. Another thing I liked about the C86 is that when you take the cosmetic panels off and have exposed the mechanism, all the working pieces are still in place. With some of the others parts of the case are integral to the mechanism or its support, so you may have to do varying degrees of disassembly, hacking and reassembly to reach the goals above. There are all kinds of goodies in these things, so be sure to hold on to some of the bits for later experimentation and hacks. Here’s a sampling of some of the bits I’ve held on to from three printers. You’ll see lots of springs, rollers (hard and soft), optical flag sensors, belt tensioners, stepper and DC motors, connectors, buttons, LEDs, etc. Stripping the mechanism – Down to the essentials In the case of the Epson C86, I stripped the printer of its exterior panels leaving just about everything
else in place. I removed the head-cleaning station as it would get in the way of the print head as I wanted to control it, disconnected the DC and stepper motors from the logic board and manually moved the paper-feed mechanism so a head stop was retracted allowing the print head to move freely. I left the power supply in place so it could power up the encoder, but that’s just supreme laziness on my part as I didn’t feel like coming up with another 3.3VDC supply to power the encoder reader. Below are some pictures of the head-cleaner being removed.
Bits and Pieces
If you’re planning to try to reuse the logic board and/or power supply for control or power functions then you need to determine if they will still do what you want without the printer behaving as expected. For example: Most printers when they’re powered up will do some kind of pre-determined actions to calibrate and clean the print head. This involves moving the print head from side to side at different speeds and distances along its track. If the logic board commands the motor to move and doesn’t see it move it’s possible that it may just shut itself down with an error code and disable power to some of the sub-assemblies inside. In the case of the C86 I turn on the printer’s power supply and after about 10 seconds during which it’s trying to move the disconnected motor it then flashes two red LEDs in protest. Fortunately that’s the extent of it and I’m able to do everything I want with the mechanism with two red LEDs happily blinking away.
Small Servo Motor
Signal tracing – What does what? How do I use it? Ok so now that the butchery is done, let’s have a look at the pieces we’re going to be interfacing to. Namely, the DC motor and the encoder reader. Stepper Motor Driven Toothed Belt and Pulleys
The DC motor should be pretty obvious as it’s located near one end of the print head’s travel. It will have the belt that drives the print head wrapped around the motor’s pulley. Buttons and LEDs Being a DC motor it also has two wires coming off of it most likely from the rear. These may be colour coded but not necessarily. If they’re not, then you’ll have to mark the wires in some way that allows you to tell one from the other. For now you don’t have to worry about which is positive and negative as that will be a function of the
direction we want the motor to turn, and that will change constantly. The main thing is to be able to tell the two wires apart. Trace the wires to the logic board where they should be attached with a connector. You should be able to remove this connector from the logic board without too much difficulty. You may need to cut the connector from the end of the wires to allow you to connect the motor to the H-bridge motor driver when the time comes. One thing I did while everything was still connected was hook up a multi-meter to the terminals on the back of the motor and measure the peak voltage that was sent to the motor while the printer was doing its power-up cycle. Depending on your multi-meter this may be tricky without a min/max function, but I believe the Epson measured close to 35VDC during the high-speed moves. This isn’t critical, but good to give you an idea of what the designers intended. You probably can get away with 24, 18 or even 12VDC just fine with proportionally slower speeds. That’s about all you need to know about the motor at this point, so on with the encoder reader. This can be slightly tricky, but armed with a little knowledge you should be able to work it out without too much trouble. 1) How do I supply power to the encoder reader? 2) At what voltage? 3) How do I get signals out of the encoder reader? In order to do this it’s best to remove the encoder reader from the print head so you can get full access to it. On the Epson C86, the encoder reader is on the back of the print head and so the head must be removed from its guide rails. Be careful not to damage the clear plastic encoders strip that runs through the reader. I remove the encoder from the printer first just to be safe. Once that’s done, carefully examine the small circuit board and locate the reader itself. It’s usually black and U shaped. The circuit board will probably have a few support components on it which may help us figure out Encoder Circuit Board how to use it. You can see in my pictures, the reader is connected back to the printer logic board by a white flat cable. I’m going to use this as-is to pass the signals back, I simply want to determine which conductors on that cable are the ones I’m interested in. An encoder sensor is really very simple. It has an LED on one side (probably infrared) and two phototransistors on the other side. The LED shines its light through the encoder strip which has fine lines etched on it. The photo-transistors are arranged ½ the line width apart so that as the encoder strip/wheel and sensor move relative to each other. The sensor outputs not only give an indication of the movement but also the direction of movement. The schematic below shows the basic components inside the encoder reader, and how it connects to the outside world.
You’ll want to get at the underside of the circuit board to access the leads of the sensor directly. The first thing I look for is to identify the LED side of the device. This should be easy as the LED side of the sensor will have two pins while the photo-transistor side will have 3 or 4 pins. Following the traces from the LED you should be able to work your way back to the connector either visually or using a DVM to test continuity. You’ll probably find that there’s a resistor in the circuit as well, so note that in your schematic diagram (you’re taking notes as you go right?) You should now be
able to identify two pins on the connector going back to the logic board. Now you can turn the printer on, and measure the voltage at the connector noting the polarity to determine which pin is Vcc (~3.3V – 5V) and which is GND. On the C86, I measured 3.2V. I could have built a custom power supply to drive that, but the printer’s own power supply was doing a fine job so I just tucked the information away for later reference. Chances are I could have driven that from a 5V supply directly without a problem, but it might be necessary to change the current limiting resistor to match so you keep the current the same. Now we can move on to finding the signals from the sensor output. Remember that I mentioned the sensor will have 3 or 4 pins on it’s output side. Two of those pins will give us the signals we want. The remaining one or two pins will be connected to GND and/or Vcc. Now that you know where those pins are at the connector, you can trace those to find the pin(s) they attach to on the output side. The two pins you have remaining are the signal pins you’re interested in. Again, trace these back to the connector and make note of them as “Phase A” and “Phase B”. It doesn’t matter which is which, but it’s Encoder Schematic important to differentiate between them.
Once we’ve identified the power supply and signal connections we have to decide how to connect to them. You could solder directly to the encoder board and use a variety of cable/wire types. Encoder Circuit Board Component Side Keep in mind however that if the encoder reader is in motion as it will be if you use the reader on the print head that you’ll have to factor that in to your choice of wires/cabling and how it’s going to run. Ribbon cable may work very well if you can isolate the flex from where it’s soldered to the board, otherwise the wires will break very quickly. Since the problem of transmitting power and signals to/from the encoder reader has already been solved by the designers I elected to use the flat flexible conductors already in place by tracing the
signals back to the logic board and tapping into them at convenient points there. Do what makes sense for your situation. You can use a standard multimeter to trace the signals. If you plan to power the encoder board from a seperate power supply, then don’t forget to isolate it from the rest of the logic board by cutting the traces on the circuit board or by other means. If as in my case you’re reusing the printer power supply for that purpose, then all you have to do is tap the 0Vdc (common) and two signal traces for use with EMC2. You’ll notice in the pictures below, I’ve tapped four signals. The black wire is for 3.3Vdc supplied from the printer itself. I just added this as I was using 4-conductor phone wire for the purpose and thought it might be useful down the road, but I’ve left it disconnected at the Encoder Circuit Board Solder Side far end of the cable.
Logic Board and Flex Cables
Once you’ve managed to trace and tap into the signals as indicated, you can reassemble and connect the circuit boards, print head, encoder reader and encoder strip, motor and drive belt so everything is ready to run though not yet connected to the PC or h-bridge driver.
Flex Cable Connectors
To test that you’ve tapped the right circuit traces, apply power either by turning the printer on of if you chose to use an external supply, apply power as planned. Now connect a multimeter (on DC Volt setting) with the negative lead connected to you 0Vdc and positive lead to one of the two phases. If you have one an oscilloscope, you can use that instead. Note the voltage read by the meter, then move the print head by hand. You’ll see the voltage fluctuate. When you stop moving the print head, it will settle either high (~5Vdc or ~3.3Vdc) or low (~0Vdc). Then move the head again, and again when you stop it will settle either high or low. What the actual values are isn’t as important as the fact that the values change as you move the head. If you don’t see the value changing, then just gently tap the head with you finger either left or right, and see if you can get
the value to change. Once you’ve proven that you have a changing signal on the one phase, then you can move to the 2nd phase and test it similarly. As an experiment, I’ve done up a quick video of the testing just to illustrate the encoder testing.
Just as an aside, you’ll see in this photograph some blue wires. I initially added these to tap the signals for the on-board motor driver so I could have gotten away without an external hbridge motor driver, but I found that many printers have proprietary motor drivers or at least ones with custom part numbers which make it more challenging to repurpose them and that would have been an unnecessary obstacle to our goals here. I did manage to find a schematic incorporating the Allegro A6628 as seen here, but this doesn’t seem to be and IC that’s available to consumers so what we learn will be of limited value. I may sometime in the future see what I can do with it, but for now the blue wires are just soldered at one end and abandoned in place.
Connectors
Logic Board Back
Next Time Now that we have a mechanism all prepped and we’ve learned what we need to about the electronics, in the next installment we’ll hook it all up to EMC2 and start the process of integrating the electromechanicals with the control system. Tapped Signals
Logic Board Motor Driver
