Lexmark International, Inc.

International Business Machines Corporation

Paul Albert Cook

Frank Edward Anderson

George Keith Parish

Randall David Mayo

Robert Wilson Cornell

Carl Edmond Sullivan

Thomas Jon Eade

Byron Vencent Bell

Jerry Wesley Raider

Anna Catherine Cramer

An ink jet printer including a printer cartridge containing a printhead attached to a cartridge carriage for translation of the cartridge across a print media. The printer also includes an off carriage ink supply, a printer microprocessor, and a combined ink fill tube and electrical connection cable connected between the cartridge and the off carriage ink supply for providing refill ink to the ink cartridge and control of the carriage and printhead. Improvements to the printer enable low cost, high quality printing to be achieved.

Ink jet printheads

Mechanical and electrical characteristics of individual print cartridges are determined and used to generate control information for customizing control of each individual print cartridge. One or more characteristics including nozzle heater resistance, drop mass and drop velocity for individual print cartridges are determined and used to derive offset values for widths of pulses used to drive nozzle heaters in the individual print cartridges. While all three characteristics are preferably used, any one or two may also be used. Once determined, pulsewidths or offsets from nominal pulsewidths to improve or optimize printing using the print cartridges are stored in memory devices located on the print cartridges so that printers utilizing the print cartridges can retrieve the pulsewidth or offset data and utilize it in customizing or individualizing control of the print cartridges.

Method and apparatus for customized control of a print cartridge

An increased resolution thermal ink jet printhead construction and method for forming large array heater chips for thermal ink jet printheads is achieved by fabricating a unitary 'megachip' in which multiple cells of electrical components are defined in a plurality of columnar patterns in a plane of a silicon wafer. Cells of a first column are vertically offset from cells of an adjacent column so as to overlap the gap between cells in the first column. The megachip is then formed by grouping at least one cell from each of two adjacent columns and dicing the wafer to remove the megachip.

Large array heater chips for thermal ink jet printheads

A stepper motor damping control system. Damping is performed by switching the power supply connection(s) of energized motor phase windings alternatively ON and OFF at a predetermined relatively high fixed rate. Said switching is performed using a clock signal information for switching one way and an information denoting equality between a voltage substantially proportional to the current flowing through said motor phase windings with a predetermined sawtooth sloped reference signal synchronized with said clock signal for switching the other way.

Stepper motor drive system

Growing community of inventors

Lexington, KY, United States of America

Paul Albert Cook