Hello from Australia

demoeb

Getting Fingers Dirty
Joined
Nov 17, 2018
Messages
14
Reaction score
8
Points
30
Location
Australia
Printer Model
Epson Stylus R2400
Hi everyone!

I'm David, I'm a tinkerer who lives in Australia. I am pretty good with electronics but not an expert. I recently purchased an XP-900 Epson. It's a great printer, I am very happy with it's CD/DVD printing feature, and I never updated the firmware on it. I knew it would make life worse for me.

I have a good feeling this site is for people like myself who feel they are being taken advantage of by companies who want a lot of money for something that likely costs a dollar to manufacture, and would like to not be ripped off any longer! :) Of course it isn't the same but I've modified most of my game consoles, from Xbox 360, PS4, all the playstations before it, Wii and Wii U etc. Perhaps in theory it is very similar though.

There's a great documentary about planned obsolescence that starts off talking about printers, and reveals it goes back many years, to mass manufacture of light bulbs, and making nylon panty hose weaker so they will need to be replaced. It is an outrage paying so much for so little when it comes to printers, I believe. In the 1990's I worked at a computer shop and bought a BJ series Canon Inkjet and that was my first experience with not being ripped off by the printer makers. Back then of course it was much simpler. There was no magic chip reset needing to be done (At least on this printer - possibly later there was on Epson) and I only had to make a hole in the top and refill it carefully (which never was perfect, and caused me to look a bit weird with ink stains, but that often turned out to be a good thing because it subtly let others know I refill them, haha!)

So I've used up the factory ink cartridges and I am almost 100% through a 3rd party set and when I put in another Magenta cartridge I saw a warning about non official Epson cartridges, and I got scared because it made me press OK and warned this may go on my service record, but I have never let the printer talk to the outside world. (Unless the reseller ran an update on my printer before I received it as I don't think it was packed back up perfectly. Or I am just being overly suspicious hehe.)

Ultimately I would love to use CISS on it but I have been told they aren't available in my region yet. I see they are in UK however. I have run WIC reset utility and it says I can downgrade my current (factory) firmware which is "PK16GC" to a lower version but I am thinking this might be a waste of money because it still won't let me refill the cartridges - they will still read 0% after refilling. I also believe there is a way to reset the printers ink pad full message.

So, there's my long-winded story! Sorry for the rambling guys, I don't know how to write it more concisely. I had a bit of a meditation on these WIC reset programs and wondered has anyone tried to disassemble these programs to see what step it goes to when it receives the "OK, go ahead" signal from the web to do the chip reset or firmware change?

Looking forward to learning a lot from this site!

Dave

I cannot find 100
 

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