October 06, 2014 @ 23:13 EDT

Further adventures with printers: The Citizen CW-01

A few days ago, someone with a Citizen CW-01 popped up on the Gutenprint mailing list. Due to its lineage, I'd assumed it (and its bretheren, the OP900) was related to the newer CW and CY families, and would work with the DS40 backend once the USB PID was known.

It turns out that the printer operates at 334dpi natively, so some additional work was needed. I'm not sure how I'd missed that. So, after some decoding of the WinXP print jobs, I discover the spool format is quite simple, and looks nothing like the newer CX/CY series.

So I ask the user to obtain some sniffs of the printer comms, and he delivered two dumps that look quite similar to the CX/CY, differing only in a couple of parameters.

So, it was pretty easy to whip up a new backend. It's out for testing now, and with luck, in a few days I'll be able to declare the CW-01 as officially supported by Gutenprint, so it'll work under Linux.

It'll be a bit more work to figure out how much of the CX/CY's status/info command set works with the CW-01, and I suspect the 600dpi support needs some more work, but for now, it's out of my hands.

In other news, another Mitsubishi CP-D70DW user popped up, sent me some detailed sniffs, and let me remote into his system for some interactive debugging; many, many bugfixes to the backend later, and it seems to be handle everything I know how to throw at it. With luck it'll also fix the CP-K60DW functionality as well.

Unfortunately, the CP-D70/D707/K60 employ a seriously screwy nonlinear tone curve/smoothing approach that I haven't been able to model, so Gutenprint's output is pretty lousy. Such is the fate of reverse-engineering efforts..


Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Free Software