No more printed smartcards.
I have had to temporarily stop selling printed smartcards for use with the card reader emulator dongles as my printer has finally given up the ghost.
The printer was originally spotted on eBay for a bargain price (around $50) when I was developing the dongles, and thinking that it would be nice to try and replicate the Japanese pre-paid cards using the dongle and an optional smartcard reader. If it wasn't for finding this printer listed on eBay, I probably wouldn't have developed the smartcard reader for the dongles.
It has been a bit of an effort keeping it going, it was obsolete and out of support when I bought it, and the spare parts needed to get it back to operational condition were tricky to find 8 years ago. It also only has working drivers for Windows 98 and requires a hardware parallel printer port (not a USB converter), so is pretty much impossible to use with current PC hardware, which Win98 won't install on and doesn't usually have the right ports.
A few days ago, the last of my stash of 15 year old laptops died leaving me without a computer to drive the printer. So I decided it was time to try to get it working under linux. I downloaded an experimental driver for a similar model printer that had been developed back in 2002, and went about modifying the source code to make it compatible with my printer.
It took a bit of experimentation, and a dozen or so cards that bore little resemblance to the image that was supposed to be printed on them, but I managed to get it to work this morning. I then went to print out some cards for a customer who has been patiently waiting, and the print-head gave up half way through the first card. Now every card printed has a white stripe through it where the print head no longer works.
The cost of a replacement print head (~$400) can't be justified against the few dozen cards that I print each year, so I'm going to have to wait to see if I can find another bargain printer (and hope that it has a good print head and is repairable!), and while I wait for one to turn up I'm not going to be able to print any cards.
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