@dragonator Well, I wish I had more time to dedicate to this. There will be no time this weekend, so I guess patience is required. I don’t see a need for you to buy a printer, unless you either are faster with testing, or you will want to verify my results ;-). Instead, it would be great to see a good ink cartridge clip and a mount to Plan B (or Plan C) come out of this.
@ezrec Yes, I agree. The connectors from the ribbon cable to the fixed PCB are much mach smaller than the connectors on the carriage, and I don;t know if I can solder there. By tapping right into the print head ribbon, I can get exactly what the printhead gets, which is what we plan to emulate. I expect a clock signal, a reset signal, a load signal, one or more fire signals and a bunch of data lines. The Power will probably be around 16V as you say. The logic however I expect at 5V or 3.3V. If that is true, we will no driver electronics at all and can connect right to an MCU.