This lab started off with a relatively innocuous receipt printer. It looked relatively modern, especially compared to some of the other equipment other teams were taking apart. A hinge could be opened to change the paper, and overall this is similar to what you would find at your small local business. Here is a link to this product (or a very similar one) on Amazon for ~$325.

The next step was to start finding whatever screws we could reach, and start disassembling the exterior casing. These were all Phillips head screws, which led us to believe that this was meant to be removed relatively easily. The outer casing was plastic, and on the inside we discovered the metal components.

After removing some more screws, we begin to encounter the circuit boards and wiring of the device. Since this is a relatively new product, it uses PCBs as opposed to homemade circuit boards, and has complex and modern circuits. The Ethernet port implies that the product has some sort of internet capability, which many modern receipt printers do have.

We can also see the impressive wire management done on this product. Many of the pieces have built in grooves and slots that the wires can wrap around, instead of loosely floating around. With the amount of moving parts present, it would make sense why Epson took so much care into making sure their wires didn’t get cut. We also see that tape was used in a couple places as an easy and effective way to mount wires to a flat surface. The electronics were a major reason why we couldn’t totally disassemble the entire printer, because boards and wires were glues to multiple pieces, which kept them hanging together. Therefore, we know this is not meant to be fully disassembled, however, some exterior casing might have been meant to come off easily for repairs.

Next up, we have the auto-cutter. It has a calibration tool where you line up a triangle into a hole, which specifies the location of the blade. This is useful for paper jams, when the blade fails to cut the paper. It would be unreasonable to have the user buy a separate cutter or take it in to servicing whenever this happens, so instead they make the problem easily fixable with clear instructions in multiple languages.

Taking a look inside the cutting tool, we can see the really cool mechanisms that drive the auto-cutter. A motor is used to drive a worm gear, which causes the peg on the gear to rotate. When this peg rotates, it moves the blade by driving it through its slot. I imagine many of these parts are off the shelf, like the motor and worm gear, as there is no real reason why these parts would need to be custom made, since they seem very standard.

Speaking of gears, we also see a nice gear train that is used to drive the paper out of the roll. Again, these are likely off the shelf gears. We see most of them are plastic, as these loads are likely small without a lot of force. The paper does not need to move quickly, so this printer can use a cheaper motor and then gear for torque.

Here, we can see an interesting hinge mechanism made from a bent metal piece. The hinge has a bump which keeps it easily closed, and can rest open, but requires some force to go from open to shut and vice versa. We can also see the liberal amount of grease that was applied to these parts, which helps for a smoother transition, and allows the part to last longer.

Lastly, we know see all the major mechanical components separated from one another. These metal pieces were likely made using die cutting, since they are all 2D cutouts that were bent into 3D shapes. This is more cost effective than full 3D parts, and works well for full-scale automation. In total, we had about 2 lbs of total casing.

Overall, I found this lab to be incredibly helpful in understanding how parts are made and a variety of different mechanisms that are used in everyday components like this. I also found the experience of disassembling from scratch to be quite helpful, as it allowed us to think in the mind of the designers of the product. We were able to figure out many of their design goals this way, based off of things as simple as what screw they used.