Want 2 free stepper motors,gear,screws,belts,etc? Read on

Community General Discussions
1

http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts006.jpg

Want this stuff for free? Then keep reading.

Ok, now with the growing problem of landfills filling up with electronics we consider garbage after 6 months, anything to help is a good thing. And on top of that, nothing is free. Or is it…?

I know many of you have tossed an ink jet printer or two in your day. I have tossed dozens. I used to fix computers as a side income and I would pickup garage sale printers and such all the time. Now that you can get a new printer and cartridge for under $50 (and a new cartridge is $40) why would anyone buy ink for a cheap printer? You ca get a whole new printer for almost the same price, with ink. So I discovered a few years ago that printers have loads of cool and free parts. You can often ask a local computer repair shop ad they will have a dozen garbage printers sitting around (or in their garbage bin).

So here is what you will find in an Epson Stylos Color600:
Waring, use plastic to work on, you will get ink everywhere. Trust me.

Here is after taking some screws out and removing the cover. Looks promising.
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts001.jpg

Most Epson Printers have a hidden port on the motherboard that is covered by the plastic case. I’m guessing for programing or calibration settings.
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts003.jpg

Ohhh, looks like some good parts here:
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts004.jpg

Here is where things get messy. Printers have a large holding tank for excess ink that is filled with 4 of these large cotton “sponges” that keep the ink from splashing around.
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts005.jpg

Once I’ve removed every screw, here is what we have:
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts006.jpg

2 Very nice looking stepper motors with metal pinions (one is a pulley to match the nice 12" rubber belt we pulled):
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts007.jpg

Here’s a nice PCB board with 4 LEDs, 2 momentary buttons and a 2 position push button. It has a ribbon cable output and, yes, we have the ribbon cable too.
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts008.jpg

A decent collection of plastic gears in 48, 36 and 24 pitch. And an assortment of self tapping screws, nuts and washers.
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts009.jpg

Here is our power supply. A nice AC-DC converter. These are great for powering Chargers or using for workbench testing. This one is rated for 13 Volts and probably handle around 5 to 10 amps. Some are 6 Volt or 9 Volt so they can differ in output.
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts010.jpg

Now here is the interesting part. I don’t know enough about programming to know if this is hackable or not but this is a complete motherboard for controlling 2 stepper motors. It has a parallel port and an S-video/PS2 looking port, 3 three-wire inputs from Encoder sensors on the printer, a connected power supply and even an on-board Bios with battery. If one of you programming wiz’s could hack it, you have yourself a free stepper motor controller complete with motors, sensors, power supply and switches.
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts011.jpg
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts013.jpg

And here is what’s left. Not much less garbage but we did get the microchips out, which are hazardous in electronics landfills, and we got a handful of free parts.
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q253/gfisher2002/robots/Printer/printerparts014.jpg

Can’t use any of these parts? Throw them out, all you lost was 5 minutes.

2

Sounds good to me. I had an old printer and dont know what I did with it. If I still have it, ill have myself some new stepper motors.

3

…or you could just fix the printer.

Er…“Fix” being a relative term in this case.

(Yes, it worked for more than two years in that state, with parts being replaced as they wore out.)

4

I’m very much willing to bet that those chips are code protected and not reprogramable.
All the nice goodies tend to be.
:frowning:

I suppose that it would be possible to keep everything as is and attempt to trick them into “printing” to get them to drive the robot.

That seems a bit much, though…
It’d probably just be easier to cut out the driver portion and use your own micro to drive them.

5

I figured something like that. I don’t know enough about programming to know if it was possible or not. I just take them apart for the stepper motors, belt and screws. :wink:

6

Not to mention the power supply.
:wink:

7

Do they really think we would take them apart and use the electronics??? :smiley: :wink:

8

I never thought that until I looked at the board and thought, “this controllers 2 stepper motors, I wonder…”

I have zero experience hacking boards so I had no idea if it would be possible or worth the effort.

9

I built my CNC router from scrap equipment, mostly printers and plotters.
Plus i just found out that i can go dumpster diving @ Wincor Nixdorf… They literally have tons of gearmotors and stuff just waiting to get scrapped…

10

yep say , go to paint draw a line from top left corner to the bottom right and print ,i think u can change the paper setting for super long and wide paper or slice the drawing up so its like a 100 pages if u could figure out the proper settings u could draw a scaled map and have your bot follow it or use abuilding layout with a colored path and have the bot follow(print) the color or with a combo printer scanner ohhboy !as far as powercut the leads where u got 13 volts and hook up a 12-14 battery
how sweet would that be
i think i burst a vessel :open_mouth: