Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer 03 March 2012 on,,,, I am the happy owner of a laser printer. It is a fantastic printer for the price. Things were going great until it came time to replace the toner. At the time, the price of a full set of toner cartridges was around $150.
To put things in perspective, the printer itself could be. Not being the type of person who so easily bends to the will of “The Man”, I set out on a journey to find a cheaper source of toner. As it turns out, the answer is yes but in the end it was worth it. This is going to be a long post, so strap yourself in. If you’d prefer to cheat, you can skip straight to the.
How Stuff Works Since I last purchased a laser printer (my circa 2001 is still kicking) the industry has changed. Imagine that!? Apparently, it is now common practice for printers and even toner cartridges themselves to count the number of pages that have been printed in order to track the consumption of toner. The printers then use these page counts to project how much toner remains in the cartridge. To my knowledge, the cartridges don’t have a way to sense how much toner remains. Why does this matter, you ask?
Essentially, it would be like having a gas gauge in your car that only tracked how far you had driven, not how much gasoline was left in the tank. Depending on several factors (driving style, load, tire pressure, etc), the amount of fuel consumed in a mile can vary wildly.
Printer firmware update About firmwares Guarantees Payment and Deadlines Discounts. Download firmware fix Printer manufacturer. Printer model Firmware version. Firmware Samsung CLP-315W (SD) Version.68f. Compatible models Samsung CLP-315W Additional info. RESET SAMSUNG CLP 320 firmware (chipear). Reset resoftare Samsung CLP 360 / 365 / 310 / 315.
The end result; you either waste gas, or run out. Neither is good.
Pbd partition bad disk crack version. The same can be said for the way modern laser printers track toner. This causes two problems. First, toner is likely being wasted (which irks me). Second, refilling the cartridges with toner purchased in bulk does nothing to reset the accumulated page count.
It is like putting gasoline in your tank, but not being able to start the car until the odometer is reset. Knowing all this, the only thing standing between me and was finding a way to reset the counters. Unsurprisingly, I am not the first person to try to address this problem. In fact, there is plenty of published hackery surrounding this printer.
Not wanting to start from scratch, I got to reading. What I discovered is that the page counts are all stored on an EEPROM chip that is attached to an bus (an, in this case). If that last sentence meant nothing to you, you might want to skip to the “Reset Procedure” section It is going to get technical for a while. Sniffing After doing some homework, I decided to try watching the I²C traffic with a to see what memory locations were getting updated on the EEPROM after each print. I was able to catch the first handful of writes, but there were so many that I decided to take a slightly different approach. I wrote an to dump the entire memory of the EEPROM to the serial port. This allowed me to see a before and after memory snapshot.