A 3rd party maintenance person come into clean and do preventive
maintenance on one of my HP256x (2563A to be exact) printers today.
Whilst observing and chit-chatting he was setting the gap between the
printer core and the static encoder.

Now I don't rightly know how a static encoder works.  But from reading
the manual and observation, it transmits data between the encoder and
the core bar via that gap at a frequency of 42.9KHz.  

Previously I had never thought how the data signal got to the core bar.
Without a low power radio signal, (in my train of thought) there had to
be some amazing ribbon cable technology that could withstand all that
vibration for 25 years.

I pondered at what an amazing device that static encoder is and what
kind of award the engineer should have got who thought of it?

HP doesn't make stuff like this anymore.

I was also thinking that if a similar device were to be built today,
someone would have used infrared or a laser between the data stream and
the core bar.

(Or two iPhones next to each other?  No excuse for not wasting bandwidth
these days.)

Tracy Johnson
Office 1-757-766-4318
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