No more printed smartcards.

[daverob]

Wait! You read Russian? Cool!

Not quite, it just came up in a google search. It was a few pages down the list of results, but has a whole load of manuals and technical notes for various industrial printers some in Russian, some in English. There's another ftp site in a .us domain that is similar but is English/Spanish, and between the two I think I've managed to find everything I need.

I got the eBay Javelin J420C printer delivered half an hour ago. Switched it on and it just started feeding the ribbon before coming up with 'Mechanical Error'. Lifted the cover and noticed the ribbon was a crinkled mess on the take-up reel and the feed side reel was not fully pushed home. Clicked the ribbon back in place and power cycled the printer. The ribbon then advanced to the yellow ink panel and stopped (which is what it should do!) and the printer came up 'Ready'.

I noticed that the card cleaning cartridge was missing, and cards can't feed into the printer without it. So I borrowed the one from the P330i, chucked a blank card in the feeder and went through the menus on the LCD display to print a test card. Results are fairly promising, the card printed OK and there's no obvious signs of a printhead failure, but the print is a bit patchy in places. I suspect that it's just that the crinkled mess of ribbon needs to be cut off the take-up reel so that it feeds more smoothly, but it could also need a service and re-alignment of the print engine.

Also got the Zebra P330i in bits on the workbench half way through the disassembly to replace the broken printhead ball-joint cap. So hopefully I'll have some good news about that one when it's all back in one piece. It'll be easier to get the Zebra printer up and running with my PC as it's a USB printer that has fairly current drivers. For the aforementioned Javelin printer, I'll either need to make a few more modifications to my Linux driver to support it, or set-up a dual boot Windows-XP PC as it's an older parallel port printer.