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Ricoh printheads
Re: Ricoh printheads
And here's some photos of a larger printer i'm now working on building around the SG1024. I got really busy with work for a few months but I will be building this out over the holidays.
Re: Ricoh printheads
Replying to MM04 interface question:
The RaspberryPi Pico can do up to 100MHz via DMA directly to the I/O port, so you could probably get 20MHz going for a 16 bit port. The RP2350 has 520kB RAM on chip that you could use to buffer a line before printing. If you want, all this runs in the Arduino Ecosystem, but also with Visual Studio Code in a much more professional environment including remote debugging. The chip has two CPUs, so one could read from SD Brad, for example, while the other one sends data to the printhead.
The RaspberryPi Pico can do up to 100MHz via DMA directly to the I/O port, so you could probably get 20MHz going for a 16 bit port. The RP2350 has 520kB RAM on chip that you could use to buffer a line before printing. If you want, all this runs in the Arduino Ecosystem, but also with Visual Studio Code in a much more professional environment including remote debugging. The chip has two CPUs, so one could read from SD Brad, for example, while the other one sends data to the printhead.
Re: Ricoh printheads
I imagine it depends how you represent your print data and what logic you have to decode it but you probably can't do much at 20Mhz. You could do something like have 2 levels of buffer, with one running at the 20khz nozzle fire speed. But still 512kB doesn't get you that far. The SG1024 has 1024 2 bit nozzles so it takes 1024*2/8 = 256bytes. So you could print 2000 lines say for a print area of 1280*2000 which isn't too bad I suppose and that would be with raw data, a lot more if you figure out some way to compress the empty / all black space.
Another consideration is timing. You want some timer to drive the print pulses with no variability but I image this is quite achievable.
I also always wondered if I could use a raspberry pi which would then have access to all it's ram.
Another consideration is timing. You want some timer to drive the print pulses with no variability but I image this is quite achievable.
I also always wondered if I could use a raspberry pi which would then have access to all it's ram.
Re: Ricoh printheads
Hi sorry for not seeing your reply earlier, but thank you very much for your detailed discussion. Actually, it is reasonably encouraging on the microcontroller side of things, not only for testing but also because (in my specific application) I'm mostly considering rather repetitive patterns. So I think 2000 lines are plenty, I might not need FPGA-based solution and Raspberry pi pico could do the job.
Somewhat unrelated but a bit of info about the potential of using Apex MM04 with a Gen4 vs Gen5 printhead, I thought it might be possible with an an adaptor board (not that I have one or know how to make one, without Gen4 pinout diagram). However, I received the following reply from Apex company (thanks to their support team for answering me by the way): "As Ricoh GEN4 printheads have a slightly different digital control than GEN5 printheads (parallel, rather than serial grey scale handling), a firmware change to MM04 is also needed, which Apex would need to apply to existing MM04 modules. Apex does not have MM04s with GEN4 firmware in stock, and you would have to design the adaptor board yourself." So while Gen4 would be more economic (and hence, probably more suitable for hobbyist setups) that doesn't seem to be a readily available option
Somewhat unrelated but a bit of info about the potential of using Apex MM04 with a Gen4 vs Gen5 printhead, I thought it might be possible with an an adaptor board (not that I have one or know how to make one, without Gen4 pinout diagram). However, I received the following reply from Apex company (thanks to their support team for answering me by the way): "As Ricoh GEN4 printheads have a slightly different digital control than GEN5 printheads (parallel, rather than serial grey scale handling), a firmware change to MM04 is also needed, which Apex would need to apply to existing MM04 modules. Apex does not have MM04s with GEN4 firmware in stock, and you would have to design the adaptor board yourself." So while Gen4 would be more economic (and hence, probably more suitable for hobbyist setups) that doesn't seem to be a readily available option