Stumped by invisible abstraction
Or,
Oh b***er, there goes another inkjet printer to the tip without really finding out whether it could have been repaired and given more service.
It seemed like a good idea. L***** had no printer, and T** had found one skipped (thrown into a skip or bin so the action becomes a verb. In Australia). The found one was an Epson Stylus C45. Pretty dirty it was. Dusty. But it had power and USB cables, so theoretically connectable to the laptop.
Never having done this before, the first problem was working out how the covers came off. Screws. Plastic snap fit catcher and the like. Easy to work out remembering the exploded view version explained in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". When everything had been cleaned – with a damp cloth – the internal workings were given a good examination. It is then obvious, that all the revealed cogs, tracks, wheels and rods that provide mechanical action for the ink reservoirs to travel across the paper, and for the paper to move through the machine, and electronic action for the ink to be spat on the paper as it travels, are all controlled from a circuit board. So what happened when we plugged it in? Two lights came on: a green and red led. And the reservoirs shifted home. What now?
Lets use the computer (has no printer, but is on broad band) to Google the printer’s name. The usual overwhelming number of results appeared. Yet a quick look through the top four pages revealed:
Some people seem to believe Epson to be criminally engaged in fraud by creating machines which indicate that reservoirs of ink are empty of ink earlier than is necessary;
That the Stylus C45 has sponges with which to mop up excess ink when the machine is in operation (I thought all the ink got used in an inkjet, so that was new to me)
That there is a means by which the Stylus C45 measures the amount of absorption of ink by the sponges and when it reaches a saturation level, at which point the machine’s red led comes on refuses to work (“Skip it mate”)
Or, the Stylus C45 counts the number of pages printed, equates this to the absorbability of the sponges, assumes that the sponges have reached their capacity to absorb, turns the red led on and stops printing;
Some person in Manila washed out the sponges in the Stylus C45 used by him there, but it still didn’t work;
Someone else in Mexico City, or maybe it was San Diego, I forget, had washed out the sponges and reset the counters, and hey presto had the machine printing happily for ages;
Not one of these sites pointed to a pdf of a manual for the Epson Stylus C45, or to a repair or maintenance manual for the same. Not even the Epson site. It may of course be there – hidden in folder 15, drawer 3 of cabinet 12 in Room 56 (or equivalent) of Epson’s archive – but to me that might as well have been rolled up in the spare duvet or locked in a vault;
Occasionally, I found reference to drivers for the machine which I could install on the laptop, but not once did I find one which was downloadable – I had to assume that Windows XP would deal with it. Later, I relented and installed a driver for the Stylus 400 – guessing that its similar name and low(ish) number would make it broadly compatible. I don’t know if I am wrong or right.
I found a site, Russian, offering a downloadable utility for use with Epson printers. “This is it” I thought, and downloaded and installed it. Despite misgivings about the security of the software (I had memories of reading “The Cuckoo’s Egg”) the computer, or what would happen on installation.
Fiddling about like this through Google had taken up the best part of a day. But I reasoned that the stumbling block I’d faced when trying to print would be the fully loaded sponges – excess ink. So out they came. Easy to find now that the covers were off and into a bucket of water. It took about 10 buckets before the water ran clear from the 4 sponges. Yes 4 sponges! They stack one on top of the other.
From the my website reading, I felt confident that the saturation of the sponges was the reason for the red led’s “always on” status. I left the sponges to dry.
When dry and replaced, the red led’s still came on and it still didn’t work. I skipped it, mate.
Written in approx 2009
