I recently needed a pair of steel rods, so picked up a free (broken) Samsung C310 printer on facebook maretkplace and was thrilled to find twelve rods of various diameters, four of which are usable immediately without needing to cut off rollers and clean off the adhesive.
I also found a ton of other usable parts, more than I expected even though I've disassembled printers before, including a number of discrete components, and a large number of gears, helpfully many with the same pitch. Everything in the attached photo came from one printer! They build them much more efficiently than this now, so this ~9 year old printer turned out to be a good find.
I also came across two parts that I am hoping to ask the experienced folks in this forum about:
A part that I don't recognize, highlighted in red in the attached photos, I think it's some sort of sensor, do you recognize it?
A part that I believe is an optical occlusion sensor, highlighted in blue in the attached photos. I would like to experiment with it on an Arduino, but am not sure if it'd need a resistor in series, or what voltage to give it (unfortunately I didn't check voltages on the main board before disassembling) What process should I follow now to try it out without destroying it?
Hello efrg
Take a piece of paper and draw a schematich by checking the traces and connections on the PCB. An ohmmeter is helpful too.
Have a nice day and enjoy coding in C++.
Blue looks like an optocoupler with an air gap. You have 3 pins - probably 1 common ground, 1 for the LED anode and 1 is the collector of the photo transistor (usually NPN). Check with DMM which pin is connected to the resistor and most likely it is for the LED anode. I guess on the other side of the board you can see the tracks and if you can see which of the other pins branches to the two halves of the optocoupler, then it is the common ground (or check with DMM to each pin if not visible). The latter remains the collector of the photo transistor.
