Saturday, 19 October 2013 00:00

Automatically cleaning a CISS equipt (with an external waste ink kit) Epson Stylus Photo 1400 once a week (via a cronjob)

Sometimes I don't use my CISS and printer potty equipt Epson Stylus Photo 1400 for a few weeks at a time. Everytime I go to use it won't work properly until I've cleaned it numerous times. I hate printers.
To try and elevate this I have setup a cronjob on linux to send the clean command to the printer once a week in the hopes that it will be primed and ready for whenever I need it.

Please note that excessive cleaning of this printer will result in the Waste Ink counter maxing out which will make your printer unusable without a reset. See here

The cronjob is setup on a linux server and my printer is attached to a windows box so samba is used to copy the file to the windows host

 

/usr/sbin/clean_printer.sh

#!/bin/sh
smbclient //host/printer -A /root/.smbcredentials -c "print /etc/clean_epson_photo_1400_head.spl"

 

/root/.smbcredentials

username=smb username
password=smbpassword

 

/etc/clean_epson_photo_1400_head.spl

This file was captured from the windows print queue. It sends the command to clean the heads and is attached below. It may work with other models but this is untested. On Windows you could presumably send this file to the printer as a scheduled job somehow.

 

Crontab line - Every Wednesday morning at 8AM clean the printer

0 8 * * 3 /usr/sbin/clean_printer.sh


If you found this useful please consider buying me a beer with a small donation using the PayPal button on the right. Many Thanks.

Matt.

Last modified on Sunday, 16 October 2016 18:40

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