Re: No more printed smartcards.
Got the Zebra P330i back in one piece, but it's having problems with it's ribbon feed. It's wrinkling the ribbon before it gets to the printhead, and then losing track of it's position. The printer was previously used by a building contractor company, and the internal parts that don't get touched by the cleaning cards are coated with very fine dust. I'm hoping that a good cleaning of all the sensors and then re-calibrating it will sort it out, so I'm reading up on that now.
The card on the right hand side of the image below is showing it's current state, the red/green/blue panels show the wrinkling of the ribbon, the big black smudge is because the ribbon hasn't advanced fully from the black panel when it's trying to print the clear overlay panel, the general unevenness of the print is probably due to the printhead not making full contact.
The J420 has just had the ribbon replaced with a new one, and the test prints look much nicer than yesterday (left and centre in the image below). I think I've worked out what I need to change in the driver, so this one should be ready to use as soon as I can figure out how to connect it to my computer. The old printer had a D-25 connector on it, this one has a Centronics type connector, and I know I've got several examples of the correct cable, but can I find one anywhere?
I think I'll probably order a USB converter cable and try to get it working with that. Then I should be able to run it from a Windows XP image in a virtual machine and use the official drivers rather than the ones I hacked together myself.
testcards.jpg
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