Identifying the Parts of a Bubble-jet Printer

Being able to identify the parts of the bubble-jet is an important skill.

1. Unplug the bubble-jet printer from the power source and the computer


2. Open the top cover to expose the inner print mechanism


3. Locate and identify the paper tray


4. Locate and Identify the paper-feed sensor




5. Locate and identify the pickup rollers




6. Locate and identify the speparator pads




7. Locate and identify the printhead and carriage assembly
   

The Bubble-jet printing process

The bubble-jet printing process consists of a set of steps the printer must follow in order to put the data onto the page being printed.

1. You click the print button that initiates the printing process.



2. The software you aree printing from sends the data to be printed to the printer driver you have selected


3. The printer drever use a page description language to convert the data being printed into the proper format that the printer can understand.


4. The printer driver sends the information to the printer whatever connection method is being used(USB, network,parallel, and so on.


5. The printer stores the received data in its onboard print buffer memory.



6. IF the printer has not printed in a while, the printers control circuits activate a cleaning cycle. A cleaning cycle is a set of steps the bubble-printer goes through in order to purge the printheads of any dried ink.


7. Once the printer is ready to print, the control circuitry activates that paper-feed monitor.This causes a sheet of paper to be fed into the printer unti the paper activates thepaper-feed sensor, which stops the feed until the printhead is in the right position and the leading edge of the paper is under the printhead.


8. Once the paper is positioned properly, the print head stepper motor uses the printhead belt and carriage to move the printhead across the page, little by little.
   
9. At the end of a pass across the page, the paper-feed stepper motor advances the page a small amount. Than the print head repeats step 8


10. Once the page is finished, the feed-stepper motor is actuated and ejects the page from the printer into the output tray. If more pages need to print, printing the next page begins again at step 7.


11. Once printing is complete and the final page has been ejected from the printer, the printhead is parked(locked into rest position) and the print process is finished