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EEVblog #303 – Photocopier Extreme Teardown
Posted on July 4th, 2012 24 comments
Teardown Tuesday.
What’s inside an office photocopier? Dave only needs a screwdriver to find out…24 responses to “EEVblog #303 – Photocopier Extreme Teardown”
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Was wondering how long it would take you to figure out that the thing was digital, rather than imaging the paper directly onto the drum.
Essentially a flatbed scanner coupled to a laser printer.-
Pedro 48 July 5th, 2012 at 04:48
Dave, great topic for a teardown
Agree, Bob makes a really important point. The teardown looked rushed, a thirty second search for the DP2310 finds the operating manual and service manual for the 2310.
Support dave’s comment about a deeper look at some of the boards in a separate vid
Unscripted works best on topics close to expertise, otherwise it erodes the value you’ve created by having a go ..
Keep up the great work
Pedro
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Jay Ts July 5th, 2012 at 05:38
A motherboard that looks like one from a PC was a pretty good clue that it’s a digital copier.
The spinning 6-sided mirror that directs the laser was really cool. I read about that many years ago, and thought it was quite advanced technology. Apparently, one rotation of the wheel applies 6 lines of pixels. If you guess the rate it scans the page, and if you can find the rotation rate of the 6-sided wheel, then you can get an idea of the required data throughput of the processor.
I also would like to see further teardown and analysis of the various boards, motors, sensors, clutches, et. al.
A long time ago (mid-1980s) I interviewed for a job with Xerox. The job was designing integrated circuits for use in one of their very first laser printers. I was young then, and I’m glad I turned it down. Being part of a design team working on a complex thing such as this copier takes good social skills, commitment, and teamwork mentality. Those took me many years to develop, and I didn’t have them just out of college!
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Oh my God! Super massive teardown. Couple of additions:
-the gears with the angled teeth are called helical gears.
-the electro-magnetic clutch allows different rollers to be engaged at different times and also allows the same roller to be reversed. There is usually only one main drive motor (so that paper speed through the entire copier is the same). The motor is coupled to various shafts and roller using gears and timing belts (to prevent slippage, and therefore change in paper speed). The gears are usually free spinning on the clutch shaft. If the electromagnetic clutch is engaged, the gear is then locked to the shaft. Thus the shaft spins along with the gear. By combining gears, you can get different speed ratios and also reverse the roller shaft direction.
-the CCD in the scanning part has all the pixel elements arranged linearly. Its a long CCD chip. So an entire ‘row’ on the paper is scanned at a time. The big black lens is designed to focus the whole row onto appropriate pixels on the imaging sensor.Would love to see another video wwith all the stuff you scored and how you plan to re-use some of that. I can think of fun uses for the LED light strip, but could you use the PC board with the processor for something?
Cheers!
-Rohit-
Yes, and if, you see, the distance from the image to the CCD is always the same thanks to the 2 mirrors that travel different distances
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Oliver July 4th, 2012 at 19:15
Wow, that was nice to see. I already disassembled some old ink printers and PC scanners, so I was used to some parts, but I totally agree that is is a wonderful piece of engineering.
I would also love to see vids about the re-use of the parts – especially the graphic display e.g. by using an advanced PIC processor.Go ahead Dave!
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I did one of these when I was a kid in the mid 80′s – As you can imagine it took months and I was in heaven!!
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Now that’s a Teardown. A literal one at that!
Any change to get a pic out of the “PC” CPU? With and without the heatspreader preferrably. :>
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Dave, that was epic. Thanks for the work, really interesting stuff in there.
I wouldn’t want to be the one to clean up *THAT* mess though
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Vegard July 5th, 2012 at 01:19
Now reassemble to check if it still works.
I could see one stepper motor. Were there any other?
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Great teardown, as usual. This one though should make people think how much valuable material gets wasted every time “obsolete” electronics devices are dumped.
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steve July 5th, 2012 at 07:23
Next thing to do is to get all the cabling out of the skeleton, connect it up on a desk and switch the thing on. Done this once and it was epic watching it spinning the various motors and coming up with various error codes until I to figured out how to lie to it that something was actually happening via the various sensors.
Never did use the display for anything though
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Ondre July 5th, 2012 at 07:25
And now, reverse teardown please! But probably the laws of thermodynamics won’t allow you to do that
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Hakon July 5th, 2012 at 09:01
Hi Dave,
I agree to all the others that this was a great teardown video. It reminds me of all the inkjet printers I took apart. They all of course have been a lot less complex, but also have been full of mechanism tricks.
If you want to get rid of some parts of your little mess I think it might be a good solution to give away some of the parts just like you have done with that Agilent LCR-Meter. I bet some people here would love to use some of the parts for their own projects…
best regards,
Hakon -
f4eru July 5th, 2012 at 17:57
“made in china from japanese and foreign parts”
Very classic for japanese stuff
It needs to have the word “japan” else it does not sell in JP and the company producing it will have bad reputation.Similar ones i saw :
phone battery : “made in China. Cell origin : Japan”
Stuffed toy label : “we make high quality stuffed toy in China based on Japanese design”
mobile phone : “made by apple in california Assembled in China” -
Ice Skate July 6th, 2012 at 02:22
Double Very Big Thumbs up! Time to reuse some parts in your next videos! Thank you for this very instructive tear down.
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Great teardown.
The scanner sensor is probably a linear CCD array, like a single line from a camera. The data is clocked of those serially at a few MHz.
I had an inkjet printer apart a couple of years ago, and was super impressed at the mechanism that let 1 motor control all the paper feeds, head cleaning and drive. Very neat.
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Rafael July 7th, 2012 at 05:20
Nice teardown; I myself have disassembled a laser printer and know exactly what you mean by the messy toner; It took me days until all the micro-particles were removed from my fingers and tools…
I have disassembled plenty of good hardware over the years (TVs, printers, PCs..) and can confirm what you said about using this material for toys and other gizmos. Not to mention the green selenium cylinder is a very nice decorative piece to hang on top of the bench! -
Oliver July 16th, 2012 at 22:00
Awesome teardown. Really, just awesome!
Now you will be properly recycling all that trash? Right?
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Hi Dave.
The “secret box” of 35 minutes, contains very nice motor with ceramic bearing,
this motor can spin veryyyy fast (about 30krmp or faser), and its dispersal is even 40s.On the connector you have power (typically 12 or 24V 0.5-1A),
speed sense, and two signals: speed up and speed down.When you connect speed up signal permanent to Vcc with resistor 4.5k,
motor begins to gradually accelerate to its maximum potential,
at the same time producing a sound like a jet Useless, but very cool
If you have time, please make a second video of this super fast motor.
best regards,
And! -
I forgot to add that the speed down signal must be connected to the GND.
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Bob Weiss, N2IXK July 4th, 2012 at 12:18