Old printer reuse

Thread Starter

dainazinas

Joined Jun 20, 2012
5
Hi,
Have had this idea of using an old printer as programmable minitool sharpening machine. So I have torn down the printer to bits to find 2 simple dc operated motors driving the cogs under the bonet. I will be using a pc controlled board(motorbee) to supply sequences to the motors. Problem is when I disconnect the original printers mainboard and hook the motors directly to the power supply it seems there is not enough current for the motors to operate(they work but very vaguely). My question is how do I get enough juice from the three terminal(1 negative, 2 positive terminals) DC power supply to make it work like with the mainboard attached.

Any help greatly appreciated ;]]]
 

mcgyvr

Joined Oct 15, 2009
5,394
You need to determine what type of motor it is before just hooking it up to a DC power supply. All motors are not alike..
Got a picture/part number/number of wires,etc...
Its probably a servo motor..
 

atferrari

Joined Jan 6, 2004
4,764
Not steppers?

My experience in this field is not vast but every printer I opened had steppers in it.

BTW I managed a successful brain surgery in an EPSON 850 replacing the micro with a 18F452.

Reverse engineering as it best.

BTW what printer is that?
 
Last edited:

debe

Joined Sep 21, 2010
1,389
The od printers ive wrecked that did have a DC motor in it were 24V DC motors. The others were steper motors.
 

debe

Joined Sep 21, 2010
1,389
It looks the same type of motor i got out of an old Canon printer & it was a 24V DC motor. Delinitly not a stepper motor.
 

Thread Starter

dainazinas

Joined Jun 20, 2012
5
It looks the same type of motor i got out of an old Canon printer & it was a 24V DC motor. Delinitly not a stepper motor.
Yup it is from Canon inkjet 460 printer.
So far I managed to determine that these motor are getting 7.3V and -7.3 for reverse. It would seem they are drawing 0.3amp from directly hooked to the dc supply and same via original mainboard. My question is why the motors lack power when they are connected directly to dc supply?
 

THE_RB

Joined Feb 11, 2008
5,438
Very modern bubblejets use DC motors as they are cheaper than steppers.

They "lack power" as they are not designed to be powerful, they are low speed motors designed to move a light weight (print head) back and forth on a belt.
 

Metalpix

Joined Aug 7, 2016
1
The 7.3V is just the standby voltage. Like a PC ATX PSU, it has a remote switch input (e.g. middle pin on a Canon K30297) to switch it from low power standby to 24V and back again. However unlike a PC PSU you can't just short the control pin to a rail. It uses 3.3V logic level. You can try to derive this using a regulator or better still two, first to 5V then to 3.3V but remember as soon as you switch on, the +ve rail will swing to 24V so you will be operating very close to the absolute max Vin of the first regulator. The overhead in implementing the control logic probably isn't worth it as the current available from inkjet printer PSU's isn't huge anyway (700mA in my case) so you might well be better off with a wall-wart or other PSU without this complication. My motors are not steppers but 24V d.c. encoder controlled. A slot detector counts black bars on a rotating disc or strip in the slot. Hope this helps...
 
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