Homebrew PCBs

Things are going badly with this printer.

After very good success with cleaning yesterday i wanted to try on PCB  
today.
Nozzle check is very bad.
I dunno what happened.


But the chip thing is criminal. A single cleaning cycle will take out a  
quarter of the cartridge! That's ridiculous!
I dunno how i can possibly work with this sh**. I mean i need to pull the  
carts to reset, but that will require cleaning to get the air out, this in  
turn takes most of the ink count away. I'm really fed up with that  
nonsensical chip crap.

I noticed the chip contacts seem to go through only a few traces on one  
side of the flexible ribbon cable to the head. I think it would be  
possible to cut this from the rest of the cable and mount the chips  
separately in a stationary setup. This would allow me to reset them  
without pulling the carts.

Any ideas if it would be possible to connect a micro that listens for the  
readout command and says "100% you stupid a**" each time it is asked?  
There is just _NO WAY_ i'm paying $60 for a set of auto reset chips,  
that's ridiculous.

As good as things looked yesterday, i wish i hadn't touched the printer  
today, it's really killing my mood when everything goes wrong. I need to  
sort the bloody chips before i can find out why it isn't printing.


ST