Eddie's Ink Chip Hack (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Eddie's Ink Chip Hack (2002)

eddiem.com

80 pointsuserbinator22 comments

I always love to imagine how the developer who designed these protections would react when reading about these hacks. Are they frustrated, amused, angry? Do they need to resist an urge to correct some small detail?

This kind of DRM is like locks - they keep "honest people honest", aka they offer enough resistance to deter the wide, wide mass of 99% of people. Outside of IT people, how many are willing to hack together microcontrollers and circuits that can reset an ink tank for a home refill?

I'd substitute the word 'compliant' for 'honest' here.

Until someone makes a kit, ala games console mod chip kits.

So what? Even these are a drop in the bucket. There were 113M PS4 units sold, even if there were 1M modchip kits circulating that would still be a drop in the bucket.

So what? So it's not just "IT people".

Also, a PS4 functions perfectly fine without mod chips, but printer ink costs will be a constant concern. Also, there is little risk in attempting to mod an otherwise unusable ink cartridge.

It's also notable 3rd party cartridges are not a drop in the bucket of printer ink sales.

I was in the camp of refilling cartridges back around the time of that article. It was terrible. I spent untold hours futzing with 3rd party ink, using alarming looking syringes and squirt bottles, getting it all over my hands, desks and equipment, and then spent more time debugging the poor print quality and clogged nozzles. One day in a fit of rage I swept the contents of my desk into the garbage and never looked back. :) I feel that in retrospect, it was a useful exercise at least to help me realize what exactly it is I am paying for when I pay for OEM refills. Also, to be fair having nozzles included in the cartridges was a technological leap that really solves a lot of the issues with or without using 3rd party materials.

How much of that inconvenience was deliberately manufactured by the printer company, and how much was innate?

It's a small number of people, but then they sell kits to do it easily, along with things like CIS.

In SE Asia, where inkjets don't clog as easily, this is a common setup.

I would suggest that the developers reaction is "salaried". It seems unlikely any hardware or software developer designed this. They probably were in the implementation portion only.

Whenever this idea was brought up, I suspect they weren't terribly interested in it. They also mentioned it would be hilariously easy to circumvent for someone who wanted to, but not the average end user. A few weeks later it was all complete and promptly forgotten about.

Here's some stuff the author of the Amazon Kindle "Topaz" DRM format had to say about the effort to reverse-engineer the format:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100114231344/http://beesbuzz.b...

https://darkreverser.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/new-blog/#comm...

I think it's interesting, in this case, that the author would have liked the work they did to be patented so that it could be discussed publicly without fear of compromising trade secrets.

Here's one account of something similar - MSN Messenger's attempt to interoperate with AIM against their will. At the end of the article the engineers on opposite sides of the battle met up and discussed it. It's a nice article.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

> I always love to imagine how the developer who designed these protections would react when reading about these hacks.

Define "developer". Do you mean the printer company and its management or an individual engineer who work for them? Speaking from the perspective of an individual, I think the hardware and software developers who designed the protection aren't really interested in preventing people from using 3rd-party ink refills, they probably had no personal motivation to lock people out, perhaps they hate inkjet printers like everyone else on Hacker News. The only reason they implemented it is because they were being paid by their employers. So my guess is a "fair enough" response.

Maybe they arleady knew this was a possibility but they work at companies large enough that it doesn't matter.

I faced the same issue. Then Epson came up with ink tank printers without any protection whatsoever.

It was glorious. They had big transparent tanks full of ink and my printing costs reduced drastically.

Refilling was dead easy and dead cheap.

It changed the market overnight. Other manufacturers followed suit.

I guess the change happened because laser printers were becoming cheap and inkjets were losing market share.

WARNING: Don't buy an ink tank printer unless you are printing documents on a daily or at least weekly basis. For occasional uses, it's the worst choice - dried ink will completely clog the printer head, even running multiple "flush" cannot fully declog it. For an ink-cartridge based printer, the head is replaced after each cartridge replacement, but with an ink tank printer, the broken lines will stay with you forever.

Also, an ink tank printer also includes a planned obsolescence feature: waste ink pad counter. For each "flush" operation, the counter increments. When it reaches a threshold, it will disable the printer and force you to send the printer back for maintenance (effectively making many people to throw out the printer). Occasional users suffer the most, since flushing the printer is needed all the time to declog it. The waste ink pad is not something magic, it's just a sponge pad and trivially replacable, but manufacturer won't tell you in the user manual and won't let you reset the counter after replacement. Fortunately, you can find the leaked OEM tool on the web.

Laser printing is the way to go. Unfortunately a color printer is still 3x more expensive than an equivalent inkjet printer.

I think it's just HP who have the heads built into the cartridge which is partly why they cost so much. Canon just uses the same head until it wears out or clogs. But yes inkjets like to be used regularly.

Hint for declogging cartridge printers: use isopropyl alcohol on third party cleaning cartridges.

Only use genuine ink cartridge for actually refilling the head, unless you really really care about color reproduction, otherwise you’ll be wasting it completely just to declog.

For waste ink pads: google how to do it at home for your printer. I’ve heard it’s a mess but often can be done and counter reset.

Epsons tend to use solvent based inks, so alcohol works well for cleaning. Others may use water-based ink, where water is suitable for cleaning, and steaming a print head over a pot of boiling water works well for stubborn clogs.

Great work ! I'm not favorable to disposable cartridges because it generates a pollution that seems unnecessary.

What’s a CIS?

Continuous Inking System (author's reference to another system)

http://www.eddiem.com/photo/CIS/cis.htm

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