Introduction

The HP 51604A is an easy to use Inkjet Cartridge. The cartridges are available on Amazon.com for approximately $14 with free shipping over $25. The complete datasheet and driving information is available in Matt Gilliand's book, Inkjet Applications. The basic principal is that there are 12 nozzles. Each nozzle has a 65ohm resistor that heats up the ink and shots out a 220pl droplet. Recommended pulse time is 4.5us on then 800us off until the next pulse. Though you can drive up to two nozzles, we do not recommend driving more than 1 nozzle at a time. The main problem with driving the HP inkjet head is the tiny contacts are a strange size and mounted on a glass substrate. While it may be possible to solder wires directly to the cartridge, we recommend purchasing a convenient to use HP holder for easy connection and easy mounting. Due to being discontinued, these HP holders are unavailable anywhere else as far as we know.

Kits

Single Axis Printer Assembly: includes two unipolar stepper motor, cartridge holder mounted to the X axis for easy to build printer, and bare PCB to drive the Ink Cartridge

Order: $80

Inkjet Holder with PCB: includes holder, FFC cable, connector and bare PCB (no chips). The PCB requires a Parallax Propstick USB and a few other components available at Digikey.com.

Order: $60

Ink Cartrdige Holder Only: includes holder, FFC cable and connector (no pcb).

Order: $50

Advanced PCB: The parallax propeller is an advanced easy to use microcontroller. It has 8 independent cpus that can be programmed for a variety of tasks. Also there are a large number of free available object libraries that make many interesting hobby inkject projects possible. In order to fully utilize the features, we are making an advanced PCB for driving the inkjet and include several addition features such as a mini SD holder for storing images to be printed, PS2 mouse + 3 axis accellerometer connector to build a handheld wand printer and 3 quadrature encoder/stepper inputs to hookup to a CNC machine or Mach3 CNC platform: Coming soon!