Quote Originally Posted by Ioannis View Post
I do not like the friction too. And this technology is not suposed to have good repeatability. Every time the rollers move the paper/pcb/whatever, they are losing a little of their diameter. So it is sure that this cannot be very accurate.

Another idea might be to use the steppers that move the rollers, to move a table having the pcb on it. Difficult as there are no datas about the motors and the gear involved.

Ioannis

Well fortunately this particular printer (Epson C66) appears to use a stepper for the paper feed motor, so in principle it should be just a matter of feeding those wires to either the original stepper but relocated to the front/middle of the printer driving a leadscrew (or use my own stepper - there's seems a little small!). Then just a matter of dividing the pulses to achieve the right feed rate.

I believe someone has done this (albeit with an HP printer) as I saw a youtube video relating to it.

The hour or so of dabbling to date....shows I'm in diffs already. Apparently the optical sensor has to be relocated very precisely to get the right timing - else the printer just gives a paper feed error. Hey ho!