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Registered Member #3781
Joined: Sat Mar 26 2011, 02:25AM
Location:
Posts: 701
I kid you not. My family has 8 printers, I hooked the best one up to the wireless network and I gave one away but I still have 6 left. Anyone know of anything useful I can do with them? they're regular inkjet printers.
Registered Member #3888
Joined: Sun May 15 2011, 09:50PM
Location: Erie, PA
Posts: 649
modify 1 to accept copper clad boards use 2 or 3 to make a mini cnc machine use the rest to build some robots or just for parts.
the metal rods inside make pretty good coilgun projectile material. the motors are all pretty powerful and quiet. the power supplies might be able to run on their own depending on the design. watch out for the "dock" that the ink carriage goes to for cleaning and the cotton mat that's usually below it as they'll be all gummed up with ink.
Registered Member #3781
Joined: Sat Mar 26 2011, 02:25AM
Location:
Posts: 701
Forty wrote ...
modify 1 to accept copper clad boards use 2 or 3 to make a mini cnc machine use the rest to build some robots or just for parts.
the metal rods inside make pretty good coilgun projectile material. the motors are all pretty powerful and quiet. the power supplies might be able to run on their own depending on the design. watch out for the "dock" that the ink carriage goes to for cleaning and the cotton mat that's usually below it as they'll be all gummed up with ink.
Ah thank you! I really like the CNC machine idea! Do you (or anyone else) know of any good starting points? I haven't done a google search yet but I bet instructables might have an article or two
Registered Member #1451
Joined: Wed Apr 23 2008, 03:48AM
Location: Boulder, Co
Posts: 661
Salvage the steppers, belts, pulleys, power supply, rails, other sliding hardware... There will be darlington array chips for the steppers...
There are a very large amount of articles, build-alongs, blogs etc. dealing with making a cnc. If you want to make a very small one for cutting foam or soft plastics you will probably just use the steppers and build everything else yourself. Printer steppers can't handle much load for machining metal and can't even do foam and plastics to that great of a tolerance.
A interesting option might be a laser cutter. You could fix a strong laser diode where the printer cartridge sits and modify the paper feed mechanism to move the work piece around. You would have to make your own stepper driver circuitry but you can find open source cnc software that you could use to do the actual control.
Registered Member #2099
Joined: Wed Apr 29 2009, 12:22AM
Location: Los Altos, California
Posts: 1716
Some inkjet printers have an optical encoder ribbon parallel to the rails, with a detector unit on the sled. That lets them know the X position more accurately than depending on a stepper motor drive train. (In fact, they often use a regular brushed DC motor for X motion, with better price/performance than a comparable stepper).
Those ribbons can be used as coarse diffraction gratings. Put one in front of a laser pointer, to produce a series of closely spaced dots on the wall. Put one in front of a computer projector that's showing one or more narrow lines, and you can learn about the projector's output spectrum.
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What to do with 6 printers?!
