Canon iP100, without a power supply. No bother, I thought, I can find a power supply.

Can I bloomin ‘eck.

googling a picture of the power supply shows that it looks pretty generic

– a trip to maplin with the printer and the following information should sort you out:

Its 16v DC, 2amp, and the plug, once you find one that fits, is has the positive on the inside, negative on the outside. They’ll have multi porpoise one with a varity of plugs and switchable polarity and that’ll sort you out.

But unless you love it very much… I’d just take it back to the shop. Printers are so cheap its not worth getting a discounted one if its going to give you any amount of hassle.

It’s a mobile printer, they are £200 normally, this was £60. I want a small one for specific reasons.

What irks me is that I have one of those iGo multi laptop chargers which would be ideal since it came with a load of alternative tips. None are intended for that printer but the one I am using for my laptop is not the intended one either, so hopes are high.

However I can’t bloody well find them 🙁 I think they are lost for good. Current thinking is to open it up and replace the socket with one I have that happens to fit the only tip I have…

Molgrips – Found one !! ??

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Canon_PU-200_Power_Adaptor_for_IP100_Printers_1607B002AA/version.asp

Ouch !! 🙄

Yeah that’s the car adapter, which is a step-up job because Canon in their wisdom decided to make a piece of portable equipment run off 16V rather than 12V, and is hence expensive.

However I have bigger problems – I got it to work by stuffing some wires into the socket and I have now discovered it has no print head!

£60 well spent then! 😆

Yeah I think a return trip to John Lewis is in order! Seems to me a printer without a print head is not fit for purpose 🙂

Never knowingly undersold

Well. Went back to JL, they said they’d refund me, but I’d forgotten to bring the thing in. D’oh! Went back again with it, they refuned me, and then I thought I’d try my luck and ask for some vouchers or something as goodwill since I’d bought black ink for the thing elsewhere on the way home and opened it, so I was £13 out of pocket. The guy went to see his manager, and was gone ages – turned out the manager had found the missing bits 🙂 So they sold me the printer back again less the £13 I’d already spent on ink, and including the colour cartridge too!

Moral of the story: John Lewis are awesome!

All I then had to do was figure out power. I happened to have a pcb mounted power socket that fit my laptop power adapter, so I took the printer apart to replace the power socket. I managed to break off all the pins on the socket though, so some extreme micro-surgery was necessary. Moral of this story: I am awesome!

Good bodge, sir.

Thanks 🙂 The new socket had solderable pins on the outer metal casing, so I bent those flat and scraped away the lacquer from the copper on top of the little pcb and soldered it to that. Once secure, I blobbed enough solder on the contacts and the stump of the power pins to bridge the gaps and make contact. Not ideal, since the forces of plugging it in and out might crack the solder, but we’ll see how it goes 🙂