Hello CNC zone. Hopefully I'm posting this in the right place, if not I'll move it right away. I've been reading quite a bit of the diy servo drives of both the atmega and arm stm32f103c8t6, the arm micro seems like a good choice but when I thought about how I would add drive circuitry that would be customized to each motor and how I would have to etch and design each circuit board, I thought of recycling a cheap desktop printer and computer into a dedicated pcb printing and inspection station for whatever drive circuitry I need at the time. My grandmother gave me her old hp deskjet 1512 as well as an old, cheap desktop computer to go along with it when my grandpa died. This setup seems to offer several advantages over traditional photoresist and etch methods, including:
Quick design, printing directly allows me to forgo the uv exposure and possibility of errors from improper exposure, so I can go straight to etching once the ink dries
Easy customization and repeatability, with printing directly from my computer I can easily tweak a few traces or components with the click of a button, or I can set it up to print off a whole series of pcbs nonstop as long as I have the blank pcbs and ink available.
Better reliability, I'm working on a program in Linux that can scan the finished pcb, both after printing and after etch, and compare to the master image on the computer to speed up the troubleshooting process if the circuit doesn't work as planned, most likely the longest part of my most likely overly ambitious project.

I will be posting the entirety of this project from the first screwed removed, any and all troubleshooting, the design refinements, and the software whenever I get around to that part.

Part of the inspiration for a dedicated pcb printer is finding the trays on eBay to send a pcb through a standard printer, though there were several issues with the design and use that came up in all of the reviews I read, most of which involved the stability of the tray and repeatability of the print. My plan is to harvest the required components from inside of the printer, design my own rigid pcb tray, and use a linear drive mechanism similar to the axis of a router to either send the pcb through the machine or move the machine over the pcb, hopefully with the improved rigidity the prints will be quite consistent and repeatable. Depending on the drive units and sensors in the printer itself I may have to make some slight tweaks to my design, such as how the linear drive is actuated or the overall shape and design of the tray itself. I'm hoping I can find some way to extract a signal from the controller when a print is finished that I can send to a microcontroller to automatically load and unload pcbs when I want to do multiple prints. We'll see how the project progresses as I learn more about the printer and how the components work together. So without further ado, let's begin the teardown process.

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