13 Mar
2005
13 Mar
'05
5:04 p.m.
At 11:09 PM 3/13/05 +0000, you wrote:
You're right. That was a brain fart.
The Thinkjet
There's
some but I don't think it checks much other than making sure the
head is at the home position. When you turn the IPC on it runs the head the
right and then homes it. I think it only checks to see that it's at the
home postion when it finishs. I don't think it even checks for a non-home
position when it moves to the right. As far as checking for print head
I am pretty sure it does. It moves the head to the right until it gets a
non-home position (and then a bit more), then restores to the home
postion. If the home sensor is playing up, the head will bang into the
side of the printer chassis (my first Thinkjet had a defective comparator
chip in the home sensor circuit, and did just that before I fixed it).
cable problems it does NOT check for anything.
(Same for all the ThinkJets)
The obvious symptom is one or more missing rows of print but that can also
be due to a clogged print nozzle so you have to use a known good cartridge.
The easiest test (assuming you can find the common connection on the
cable, which IIRC is pretty obvious) is to check the resistance between
the common connection and each of the others in turn with the cable
disconnected from the logic board and a cartridge fitted. It's very
unusual for the print cartridge elements to fail, so if you get an
'open' at the logic board end, it's likely to be the cable, alas. Of
course you can test the cartridge by checking for continuity between the
contacts on the catridge face.
they're almost certainly still good. The
other good news is the the
printer mechanism was designed by Canon (and perhaps built by them) and it
uses the same cartridges as the Canon Diconix printers so that gives you a
second source of cartridges.
I thought that the Diconsix printers were Kodak, not Canon. electroncis (which is different to the DIconix
electronics) is very much
HP -- the processor chip has a HOIL port built-in, it uses the Saturn bus
to talk to the RAM and font ROM (although I am sure the CPU is not a
Saturn), and so on.
I was under the impression, probably from HP journal, that the cartrige
was very much an HP invention. But maybe not.
OK I wasn't sure. It's been a while since I played with any of them and I
know some are SS and some are DS. I think there's one or two combo drives
tht have QD floppies but I don't remember which ones. FWIW the QD drives
are easy to recognize since they have a BIG eject button and it's located
in the center.
It's still 600rpm, it's still a DS DD drive, it's still
One more thing about floppy drives. HP made
single sided, double sided
and quad density drives. The one in the IPC is DS. The one is the 9121 is
SS. I THINK the ones in the 913x and 915x are also SS so you can't use them
The 9133H is certainly a DS drive (I use them). The 9153 uses a rather
different drive. Sony, but it's the later design with a 34 pin
power/data cable and many
parts also used in the Mac 800K drive (!). It's the same drive unit in
the 9114B.
It would be _possible_, I think, to get that later drive in place of the
older one. But you'd have mechanical problems (at least in the Integral,
where the drive had no faceplate, the eject button slots into the front
of the machine itself), you'd have to make up a special cable. The older
drives are not that rare, it's probably worth finding one.
HP 9122Ds and Ss are a good source. They seem to be common and are
inexpensive and you get TWO drives to play with.
Joe
Remember you can use one with a defective logic board or spindle motor.
All you need is the head assembly. THere are 2 logic boards used (IIRC
FC9 and FC16), they're basically interchangealbe, but you might want to
keep the one that was in the IPC originally.
-tony