Rick's b.log - entry 2023/11/11

Printer calculator #2

Inside, the printer is an Epson Model-52. Clearly Googling for this is not going to be useful...

So let's look inside.

The printer module (underside).

As with the previous model, there are eight wires connecting to the printer module. The left two activate the solenoid. The middle four go to a positional sensor. The right two go to the motor.

The printer only outputs in black, but it's different in that the print wheels are stacked one atop the other and they rotate sideways.

Close up of the print wheels.

The layout of the print wheels are as follows:

⬚ 7 0 8 1 9 2 - 3 , 4 · 5 # 6
R E √ Δ M + C × - ÷ = ◇ ⬚ * %

The '⬚' is a space, because like the previous calculator (and probably all of these sorts of devices) it is incapable of moving the head without printing something.

When in use, this is the waveform when printing.

When printing something.

And here's the waveform when doing a linefeed.

Doing a linefeed.

So, as can be seen, printing activates the solenoid for 6 milliseconds, and shortly after for 7 milliseconds. Shortly after it activates the solenoid for 18 milliseconds.
If I remember correctly, this was for printing "0⬚C" (what happens when you reset the calculator), so the first pulse will be for 'C', then a pulse for the space, and finally a pulse for the '0' which is longer to then throw the linefeed.

It was at this point the printer broke. It's still operational as a printer, but the little rubber wheel that feeds the paper disintegrated. Upon opening the thing up to gain access to see what was wrong, I had to deal with a sticky mess that was once a piece of rubber. Given these calculators cost something like €30 from Amazon, I'm not sure it's worth the time trying to locate a spare part. Even if I found one (which I don't hold out much hope for), if it's six or seven euros postage, well, that's about a fifth of the price of a shiny new model.

But it does mean that I can mess around a little more, as it doesn't matter so much if I accidently break the thing.

By messing around, something like this...

Playing with the printer module.

What I'm doing here is running the motor (powered by piggybacking on the batteries that run the calculator) to observe what the rotational sensor is actually doing.

If we look at the sensor in more detail, we can see four contacts. The top and bottom contacts touch the outer ring, which contains thirty spokes that corresponds to two rotations of the print wheel.
The second contact is activated once per rotation of the sensor (or two of the wheel), when the print wheel is lined up with the '⬚'. The third contact is the inner disc and appears to be the 'common' connection.

The rotation sensor.

If we look at the signal from the upper contact, it looks like this, a seemingly steady(ish) stream of pulses a smidgen under 1ms each, that come in pairs. The two elements of the pair are separated by 3¾ms, then each pair is separated by 4½ms, as can be seen here.

The result of one contact.

Now if we merge in the second contact, the two waveforms together look like this. It's necessary to do it like this as my little oscilloscope isn't dual channel.

The result of both contacts.

If we think of this as, perhaps, number start and end markers, then there are about 8ms between the beginnings of each pair of pulses. So it would suggest that one can time the character printing by activating the solenoid when the start signal is received and releasing it when the end signal is received?

Changing the print wheel used? This is actually automatic. The bottom wheel is only used in the rightmost column. It looks as if the second-from-the-right column cannot be used, activating the print mechanism here will cause the print wheel to change position, dropping so the upper wheel is the one that contacts with the paper from this point on.

If you turn the mechanism by hand, then things behave slightly differently, which might be due to the difference in speed. In normal use the disc makes a full revolution a couple of times per second, so the wheel is going twice as fast. So take this with a pinch of salt, doing it by hand is a few magnitudes slower.

To print a digit:

• Using the home contact to know where the print wheel is, count off start pulses until we're two digits before the desired one.
• Character start - press the solenoid.
• Character end - ignore.
• Character start - release the solenoid.
• Character end - ignore (mechanism is preparing to print).
• Character start - ignore (printing is happening).
• Character end - ignore (mechanism is moving to the next position).

It remains to be seen if this method holds up when the device is running at normal speed.

To print a digit, linefeed, and return to the rightmost column:

• Using the home contact to know where the print wheel is, count off start pulses until we're two digits before the desired one.
• Character start - press the solenoid.
• Character end - ignore.
• Character start - ignore.
• Character end - ignore (mechanism is preparing to print).
• Character start - release the solenoid (printing is happening).
• Character end

With this in mind, I think I was getting hung up on what sort of control firmware would be providing the precise timing for the printer mechanism, which could get 'tricky' if the batteries start to run low and the motor slows down a fraction.
But after playing around with this unit, it occurs to me that the mechanism may actually be pretty much self-timing, all the controlling device needs to do is use the pulses for knowing which digit is about to be printed, and when to activate the solenoid.
So there isn't really any fancy timing, it's just based upon what the printer itself is feeding back.

Obviously this unit with it's fixed behaviour of "these characters only on the right" and only in one colour is a lot simpler than the other one. There will be numerous similarities in operation. I suspect the only real difference would be what to do to select 'red' as a print option. Otherwise, I can imagine it is largely similar behaviour.

Now, you might be wondering why there's an end marker if we pretty much ignore it. Well, we might need to tighten up the timing in normal use, perhaps on at start and off at end? We also use end to get fed back the status of the carriage return.

Which means the only unanswered questions here are:

• Why is the lower print wheel (for the rightmost column) slightly offset from the upper print wheel?
• Why the interleaved arrangement of digits (7 0 8 1 9 2 rather than 0 1 2 3 4 5)? If you want to print, say, "1000" you'll need to wait for the '1' and then a revolution for the '0' and again and once more, so I don't see that it's necessarily faster except for certain pathological cases (I can imagine 71368 could be printed fairly rapidly).
• Why the slight differences in timing in the sensor wheel (that pairs grouping). I didn't notice anything with the print wheel layout, but I'm guessing this might be too slight to be visible to the eye.

With this in mind, it could now, I think, be feasible to write some code to control this printer from some sort of Arduino or other microcontroller.

Briefly, something like this:

Get a number to print.
Invert it (as we print from the right).
Translate it in to wheel positions (relative to HOME).
Start motor (a GPIO via transistor).
Loop:
  Wait for HOME
  Count X-2 START pulses (note: first happens at same time as HOME)
  Activate solenoid (a GPIO via transistor).
  Wait for next START.
  If not final digit, deactivate solenoid.
  If not final digit, repeat loop.
Wait for next START.
Deactivate solenoid.
Wait for END.
Pause while END.
When END goes low, stop motor.
We're done.

A future enhancement would be to keep on tracking the wheel position during printing to determine if it's possible to take a shortcut and print sooner rather than waiting for HOME to sync each time.

Better oscilloscope plots - DSOplot update

This requires so simple changes to PROCplotpoint in my DSOplot software (described here).

Change the end of PROCplotpoint from this:

    DRAW xpos% << 2, prevypos << 1
    DRAW xpos% << 2, ypos << 1
  ENDIF

  prevypos = ypos
ENDPROC

to this:

    REM Draw the primary line
    MOVE prevxpos% << 2, prevypos << 1
    DRAW xpos% << 2, prevypos << 1
    DRAW xpos% << 2, ypos << 1

    REM Draw the shadow line
    MOVE (prevxpos% << 2) + 2, (prevypos << 1) + 2
    DRAW (xpos% << 2) + 2, (prevypos << 1) + 2
    DRAW (xpos% << 2) + 2, (ypos << 1) + 2
  ENDIF

  prevypos = ypos
  prevxpos% = xpos%
ENDPROC

Now the output lines will be thicker, as demonstrated here.

Your comments:

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jgh, 12th November 2023, 04:00

It's essentially a teletype!  I had to count the head characters twice to get it in my mind that it's 15 x 2 and not 16 x 2, and that gives the answer for the odd spacing.    Each digit is offset by 2 from the next one, even when wrapping around to the beginning again, because it's an odd number. That will make the encoding of the outputs a lot easier for digits. The other characters will be treated as run-on from the digits, a sort-of pentidecimal 0-E. With the row selection being automatic based on head position they're likely to be just treated as the same pentidecimal digits internally.    At the I/O level the print head will be functionally:  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - , · # ⬚  √ N C - = ⬚ % E Δ + × ÷ ◇ * R

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