possable winder idea

The older HP inkjets like the 855 use a stepper motor for the paper advance and a dc motor with a optical tape for print head placement.

Has anyone hacked a inkjet printer interface?

What I am thinking the former printhead part does transverse and the stepper the winding and counting via step pulses or an encoder.

What we would need to know is the control codes and how much of the standard printing is done by the printer or PC. It might be as easy as a parallel interface/USB etc.

Yes I know the platen does not turn fast but it could be a start. I would work on speeding it up later.

Some thoughts please

or use a turntable like this guy does to wind guitar pickups
http://home.worldonline.dk/jradmer/pickups.htm

The turntable does not have the control. Printheads have good servo control so the wire could be wound in all kind of patterns.

I have same idea to make winding machine from dc servomotor ( it have opt. encoder ) and step motor .
In case of stepper, it is possible to controll whole thing from lpt port of pc.
Also, it is possible to control wire tension in this application using wirewound potentiometers from old analog x-y recorders.
If there's someone who want to have cool winding machine and can write program to control this thing via lpt port, I can help with mechanic parts from Israel mil.sur+.

PCL (Printer Control Language) is a simple programming language that can be directly parsed by the printer... It is the native means of communication for all HP laserjet printers, and can be understood through an "emulation" mode on some bubblejet/inkjet printers...

In theory -- if you did the math in terms of what the head motion increments need to be, a whole "winding program" could be buffered and run through the printer... But the motions you'd be using aren't native to the printer's actual functionality -- say one winding is one full rotation of the paper handling motor... You'd need to translate that motion into something a printer's logic could understand. In PCL, that same motion might be the equivalent to 4 inches worth of linefeeds or whatever... But I guess it could be done and handled easily enough by a cheesy program interface. Lots o testing to figure out the proper motion cues though.

I have a friend that made a motor control system using steppers and a parallel port, so I know this can be done. The interface and control logic chips are all out there. I'll ask him about it.

Interfacing stepper motors to a parallel printer port is actually quite easy. I did this for my homebrew engraver:

http://www.gyraf.dk/tmp/Gyraf_CNC_01.JPG

It can be done either directly - which requires quite a lot of step programming - or with dedicated stepmotor controller chips:

http://wiredworld.tripod.com/tronics/stepper.html

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ih/doc/stepper/control2/connect.html

Using parallel port for interfacing:
http://www.hut.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/parallel_output.html

Jakob E.