CNC and Stuff V2

Don’t worry I havn’t given up on it yet either. I have decided to do away with the big fancy frame I had for it, We are running out of space on the walls anyway. I decided to create a small box just a inch bigger around than the lcd and about 2 inches thick to hold it all. I think that sitting this on top of the entertainment center would actually look much nicer.

Now for anyone who has found this page or has been following along, should I stick with linux or revert back to windows? Please comment or email me with you reasoning behind your choice of os for this project.

Please, I would really like to have more involvement from my readers in my projects.

Ok so this is not a full review but a first glance kinda thing.

First off be prepared to sit awhile for the software to finish installing. I have a 7500rpm sata drive with a 32M buffer backed by a dual core 3.2G AMD proccessor. It still took 15 minutes to complete!

First thing first, I love the feel of the printer. Yes it is fairly large, but it has a very clean look about it. It has 4 buttons and a 3 inch touchscreen for controls. See my previous post for what you can do with those few buttons!

Did I mention that you can load both standard and 4×6 photo paper at the same time?

Next off is connectivity. The printer has ethernet, wifi, usb and can use a bluetooth adapter as well. I have used ethernet, wifi and bluetooth to print so far. The setup could not be easier thanks to it’s web based config page.

I didn’t mess around with all the software or all the settings available in the drivers yet as I just wanted to get the thing to print a photo so I could check it’s quality against my Olympus ILP-100 dye-sub printer.

I was shocked….

.

…….

(picking my jaw up off the floor)

…….

(wiping the drool off my chin)

I had a perfect, borderless 4×6 print in less then 30 seconds! I mean freakin awesome, can’t tell the difference between my dye-sub 90 second print perfect. I have yet to try for a full 8×10 photo print yet but the text printing is quick and sharp as well.

The only thing that I have found that I don’t like, and I am sure that I can work around it, is that when printing borderless photo prints the printer will “correct” the image and enlarge it to fill the page if it is within a 1/4 inch or so of filling it.

Stay tuned, I hope to have a video of the photo printing up soon as well as some more info on the hidden menus.

Ok, I just got me a new, well refurbished, HP Photosmart D7460 printer. So what? The what is that it came with only 5 of the 6 ink cartridges that I need to try it out. Talk about being upset! Anywho I started poking around, trying different button presses and combinations trying to get past the “The following ink cartridge(s) apear to be missing or damaged” warning.

GUESS WHAT!

I failed miserably.

I did however find out that you can access the “Mfg Commands” menu by pressing the “Print Photos” and “Red Eye Removal” buttons at the same time.

Once you do this you get a screen saying “Enter Special Key Combo” with a OK button and a back arrow button. First thing I did was hit the OK button. I was rewarded with a menu of superuser commands! I played around and didn’t find anything to interesting in this menu so I went off to try and find some of those “Special Key Combo”’s that it asked for.

This is whaI have found so far:

this assumes that you have already pressed the “Print Photos”+”Red Eye Removal” keys also the former will no be known as PF and the latter as RER

push RER PF RER

push PF RER RER

push RER PF PF

push PF PF RER

All of these load up different menus. Some of these are tests some are named to scary for me to try on my new toy!

As I fiddle some more I will keep you all informed of my progress. Hopefully that does not include trashing my new’ish printer