EEVblog #303 – Photocopier Extreme Teardown

EEVblog July 4, 2012 EEVblog, EEVblog - Podcast 27 Comments 2,433 Views

Teardown Tuesday.
What’s inside an office photocopier? Dave only needs a screwdriver to find out…

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Bob Weiss, N2IXK

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
  
  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
- Jay Ts
  
  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!
Rohit de Sa

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
- jcc
  
  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
Oliver

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!
Paul Jones

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!!
John

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. :>
Jan

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 🙂
Vegard

Now reassemble to check if it still works. 🙂

I could see one stepper motor. Were there any other?
Manu

Hello,
Great teardown! Did you find the mysterious hard disk?
huh

Great teardown, as usual. This one though should make people think how much valuable material gets wasted every time “obsolete” electronics devices are dumped.
steve

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 🙁
Ondre

And now, reverse teardown please! But probably the laws of thermodynamics won’t allow you to do that 🙂
Sonnie

The “precision thingie” is clearly a polygon motor. 🙂
Hakon

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

“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

Double Very Big Thumbs up! Time to reuse some parts in your next videos! Thank you for this very instructive tear down. 😉
Tim

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.
Rafael

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

Awesome teardown. Really, just awesome!

Now you will be properly recycling all that trash? Right?
Michael

Lets hope they dont want it back!
And!

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!
And!

I forgot to add that the speed down signal must be connected to the GND.
Vikpc

hi.. teardown lots of this “big” copiers for electronics parts 8)

08:40 – Flywheel for store rotational energy.. because it use only one main motor for all 8)
17:05 – Its solenoids (not motors) for “emergency stop”/”switch path” mechanic… apply 24v to this and what happening 8) I’m think it used because this big copiers have Flywheel
25:36 – Humidity sensor
33:30 – Main laser system for charge on the photoreceptive (green tube) drum… (all laser printers have it)
Zsola

Hi all!

The drum is actually not made by selenium, it is highly toxic, so have been withrawn from the market long ago. Those ones was brownish-grey as I remember, this is green because its made from an alga. The name is OPC, Organic Photo Conductor, so it can recyclable. It is coated on an aluminium pipe. Anyway, selenium was far more durable.

The second: this is a digital multifunction printer, so the top half just digitizing the sheet of paper (the sensor is not moving, but I’m just at 22min), then the bottom half is a laser printer, uses a laser to discharge the OPC.

Greetings from Hungary 🙂
Eduardo

Hi,

Nice teardown! haha.

I also use to dismantle some of these from time to time, when I got a ahand of one.

It’s a mess, you gotta have a hoover at hand because of the tonner, but I do really enjoy just watching how these evolve over time.

Among the many reusable parts these come with, one of the most interesting for me are the main “pcb motor”, as you call it.

These are a brushless motors (out-runner type), normally wye-ended, and the board it’s obiously it’s driving circuitry, which takes care of conmutation (almost under any circumstance) and the gory details of it, on behalf of the main processor.

You could some day do an episode about these, highly used nowadays on hybrid cars,
electric bikes, and even in industry, because of their high efficency, and it’s power/size ratio, perhaps including some ideas on driving them (high-side nmos switching, etc).

I find this a specially interesting subject, because it enables one to turn electronics into electronically-controlled mechanisms.

Cheers!