For sh!t5 & giggles....

[Forty One]

I have a JV33 in running BS inks that I want to convert to Ecosol inks. SS21...
I'm currently need to make the choice to purchase a new mainboard or throw a hail mary in there.
I'm going to attempt to dump and flash the main firmware directly onto the chip via use of a CH340 reader.

But....

Which chip???
I would assume that the rom chip would be located close to the CMOS battery, but there are multiple of those chips. So bringing down the selection is quite hard.
Can anyone lead me in the right direction of which chi p the firmware would be stored?

 

[Smoke_Jaguar]

Start typing chip numbers into a search engine. Best bet is look for common memory suppliers, Sandisk, Samsung, etc. The Altera chips like the Cyclone will be the FPGA, which acts more like a processor. What's the p/n on your board? I might have one I can reference on hand and I can take a pic to highlight what's what.

From what I can tell, most memory on the printers I have used, the battery is mostly for the RTC (clock). I don't believe anything volatile is going to be your firmware, unless the designers were especially idiotic.

 

[Gettin'By]

Smoke is on the right track. I used to do electronics repair. The attached has a chip that is commonly a flash chip circled. That would be my best bet.

 

[Gettin'By]

The one purpendicular to that is usually RAM. I have seen those battery backed up, but not often.

 

[Forty One]

Smoke_Jaguar P/N is E105454-F

Yeah, thats a flash chip. And here I was looking for an 8pin.

Yet, that samsung chip is DRAM. Wouldn't the firmware be stored here?

And now will a CH340 cut the mustard on reading this (or the other) chip?

If all goes well, I'll get the firmware off my other JV33 and flash that accross.

 

[Smoke_Jaguar]

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/rochester-electronics-llc/S29JL032J70TFI020/13483115
The U12 board mark chip made by Spansion, it's the flash memory. DRAM is volatile working memory, nothing useful there and everything dumps on power off. Digikey listing is for a different variant, but should put you in the right realm for pinouts. Best bet for dumping the chip would probably be an XGecu programmer, MIGHT require desoldering, or tapping the pins directly.

If you feel really daring, can probably find an old flash drive and transplant the chip to that if the controller is compatible. But the XGecu is like $50 and great for chip hacks.

 

[Neil]

I have a JV33 in running BS inks that I want to convert to Ecosol inks. SS21...
I'm currently need to make the choice to purchase a new mainboard or throw a hail mary in there.

I have a JV33 BS that I picked up recently. It allows for all other ink types. Maybe a tech swapped out the mainboard at some stage? I don't know.
More likely there's some parameter that he could change.
It was set for ES3 when I got it, I've switched it to SS21 and am running Jetbest New Eco inks. (Same as my CJV30)
I'm only telling you this because we have similar interests.

Why do you want to swap out of BS3 inks?

I wonder what would happen if you just swapped inks to say Jetbest, but left the machine set to BS3.
Put BS3 permanent chips on the 8 refillable cartridges.
Do you think it would jet differently? I can't see it being much different ink type.

I do remember when I first started using Jetbest in the CJV30, the machine previously had ES3 inks and I had some ES3 permanent chips, so I left the ink type set as ES3.
It worked, but there was some faint ghosting within the images.
I got some SS21 chips and swapped the machine to SS21 and it seemed to clear it up.

 

[Forty One]

This machine is a BS model. And even with the firmware update it's locked into only BS series inks.
I want to change it over so I'm only running one style of inks over all my machines and ss21 has a larger colour gamut.
Plus the BS inks stink

I also got this machine for a bottle of whiskey so if I end up bricking it, I'm always able to pull parts off it and donor into my other machine

 

[Gettin'By]

Does this machine have a firmware update feature? Or will it only update similar code to a newer version? The Cisco stuff I used to work on had a way to update like that, it'd even do the microcode on FPGAs. Older simpler stuff had a JTAG port you could use a homebrew adapter to upgrade if you had the "netlists". Altera and the other manufacturers had freely available software for doing it, but we couldn't get the netlists to make it work, but those come from the board manufacturer. Process was called "borderscanning" IIRC. No removal of parts needed to do that, or the Cisco method.

 

[SightLine]

Also potential that there is a TTL or regular serial header or pads somewhere on the board. With that you could connect a console. Watch the boot loader startup and see if there is a way to interrupt the boot sequence and if there are any boot loader menus. Might have TFTP functions built in that way. That method will often also enforce firmware CRC though and reject the standard firmware too.

 

[JBurton]

Commenting to keep up with this thread. Very interesting stuff guys, keep at it!

 

[Gettin'By]

If you can, get a backup of the image on the chip in case it bricks. Sometimes we'd have issues with all code on the board needing to match, and just flashing the firmware chip wouldn't work without the upgrade installer to get the other programmed parts as well.

 

[Solventinkjet]

Have you tried throwing the American JV33 firmware on there? I've never tried it myself but it's worth a shot. The American version only supports SS21 and not the BS3.

 

[Forty One]

I've got the BS board with the blue dot.
My understanding is the solvent board has a red dot.
Ive recently had it upgraded to latest firmware from a techie in the Phillipines (remotely) to see if that would open up the option but it only included bs3 & bs4 inks.

Yeah, I'll definitely be backing up the chip when I access the existing firmware for Justin Casey.

Re.the serial port avenue... I would need to get an oscilloscope etc...
I was going to hit it with a ch340 until I found out it uses a 48 pin. So the xgecu looks to be the option.

There's obviously alot to breakdown here and my electronics knowledge isn't probably at the level it should be so it's great to get feedback from people here who not only know electronics but also the jv33.

Ill probably open up and photograph the jv33 130 board prior to see if there are any visible differences first before buying all this hacky hardware.

Failing that, if anyone has a board from a jv33, keep me in mind!

 

[Smoke_Jaguar]

Yeah, CH340 is just a USB to serial interface chip. Great if you can talk back and forth and tell the microcontroller to send the image over the connection. If you can find a programming header and are good a chasing pinouts, could probably use a Bus Pirate as well. Thankfully Mimaki's ink parameters aren't ridiculously hard to decipher, but pretty much all my experience is in the UV realm on the 2016+ era boards.

 

[Forty One]

Solventinkjet I may take you up on that offer to see if there are any difference in Firmare before tapping into the flash chip.
We have the BS series inks here in Australia. Strange why you cant use it in US.
The techie I used was from Phillippines, so possibly?????

I have FW Update tool 3 v2.3
I understand theres a more recent one, but I couldnt get my hands on that version.

Smoke_Jaguar Running a Bus Pirate could be an option except it runs in shell. My coding skills are limited.
The Xgecu at least has an interface and does all that work for you.

 

[Smoke_Jaguar]

Yeah, the Bus Pirate takes some learning. As for regional inks, some of it is pricing, some of it is regulatory. Some people endlessly moan about some of the nastier chemicals getting banned, but it's nice to see the lifespan of people who work with the stuff getting longer. In most cases, if the inks are similar in the way they flow, viscosity, ect, the types don't really change printhead behavior. Mostly just a check to keep people from loading incompatible inks from the defined set.

 

[Forty One]

SO here's a pic of the JV33-130 board running ES3 inks.

And here's the board from the JV33-160 BS

SO good thing is it doesn't require the colour coded jumper block located next to the relay (bottom right).
There's no harness there.

Step 2.... order Xgecu.

 

[Gettin'By]

Wonder if you can duplicate how that tech did it? I assume over ethernet to some kind of technician's interface. Is this printer old enough information for that has gotten out on to the interwebs?

 

[Gettin'By]

I checked for the update procedures, and found this little gem in the "error message" section. Looks like it may not take the update that way, and back to where we were.
"The version of firmware which
transmitted to the machine does
not correspond with the version of
firmware installed on the machine."