[YLUG] Epson print cartridges

[Roger Leigh]

David Harker <david.harker at oneiria.co.uk> writes:

> I look after the PC of a member of my family for her and had to resort
> to google when all 3 of the colour ink cartridges in her epson decided
> simultaneously that they had run out despite barely any use. To cut a
> long story short I'm now the proud owner of a little gadget to reset the
> "ink level" (read: "death clock") chips in them. I don't have an epson
> and have no idea if it works yet but if anyone else does and has
> experienced a similar problem then I'd be happy to bring it along one
> evening and zap you. Would be interesting to see how much more ink you
> can get out of those things.

The chip should store the amount of ink used; IIRC it actually counts
the volume of droplets fired, which is in the picolitre range.  Unless
there is a fault, it should deliberately leave some ink in the
cartridge (though not much).  This is in order to prevent air and dirt
being drawn into the printhead, which would happen if you drained it
completely.  The nozzles in the head are very fine precision
piezoelectric crystals, and dirt will clog them (potentially
irreversibly).

If the chip is definitely wrong, it might be safer to return the
cartridge for a replacement.  If you reset the chip when the cartridge
is half-full, for example, you do risk ruining the printer when it
gets fully drained.

If you aren't using it already, the "escputil" tool does the ink level
checking for Epson printers on Linux.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
 : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux             http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
 `. `'   Printing on GNU/Linux?       http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
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