[sixtharmy]

Hi Greybeard, Let me take your comments more or less in order.

I'm afraid that the microfeed buttons available on the vintage 1996 Stylus Color 1520 aren't of much help with what I'm considering. I'd like to bypass Epson's built in controller/firmware through which they operate. In addition, as far as I can remember, the SC1520 was one of a very few of the more than 70 inkjet models that Epson has produced since 1992 that implemented this feature. I believe it was because the SC1520, unlike most Epson inkjets, had a tractor feed for fan fold continuous paper like older dot matrix printers. There's a fair amount of slop in this feed system and the manual microadjust was to allow you to move the paper back and forth a within a quarter inch or so to hand "register" the top of the first form beneath the print head. Great idea though. I remember standing in a second hand store about a year ago staring at an SC1520 and thinking the same sort of thing.

As to your second comment, I'm interested in coming up with a hardware/firmware/software solution that will replace the print head (x) paper (y) and jet firing (z or some other axis like router speed) contoller within a printer. This would allow us to remove just the print head (the part that moves back and forth on a rail) from a printer and mount it on the sort of (x,y,z) positioning equipment used in CNC so that the head can be used to do things that it can't do while trapped in the hardware/firmware that's only meant to print ink on paper.

As to your third comment, I can go at least one better. Several manufacturers (Xerox, 3M, etc.) have conductive inks available that should be compatable with inkjets and you can bet that they're working on inks that are definitely compatable. So it is reasonable to expect that you could pattern a PCB in a CAD program and print the traces directly to a CNC predrilled resin board with no heat or wet chemistry. Further, I've seen some reports of resistive inks. So instead of computer positioning and wave soldering a passive surface mount resistor between the conductive traces you've printed you could concievably print a drop of resistor between those traces, as you're printing the traces. I've even read a few papers in which semiconductive and insulating inks have been layered to produce active components. In the last six months or so you may have seen in the news prototypes from Epson, Sharp and others of paper thin, flexible display screens. Guess how the Organic Light Emitting Diodes that make this tech possible are put on the flexible polymer sheets? Yup, inkjets.