HP DJ T3500

[theengel]

I'm starting to really hate this series.

I've got one that called for a new printhead. The customer replaced it. It goes through some processing, and after almost 20 minutes, says the printhead failed. I forgot to take a picture of the screen when it came up, but I get back to the home menu and it says printhead replacement was not completed, and wants me to do it again.

I thought maybe it was just a defective printhead, so we installed another new one. It did the same thing.

As I was trying to pull up the service menu, I would suddenly get a 81:01 error. Sometimes I would restart it, and the error would go away. Sometimes not.

The funny thing is, the screen tells you to turn the printer off and move the carriage by hand. But while it was in that mode (having a 81 error) the service station was capping the carriage. You wouldn't have been able to move it by hand after turning it off. And then another time, it gave me the 81 error while the SS was NOT capped.

The whole damn thing is really erratic. I don't know whether to start with the carriage or one of the other boards, like the formatter.

There are some LED's on the carriage unit. Does anyone know if they mean anything?

[Kiran Otter]

I very much dislike these printers and the unified printhead they use.

Make sure the firmware is up to date. Latest is AENEAS_03_10_01.1

Did you moisten the tube septums with water before inserting the printhead? Though typically this just helps with being able to close the printhead latches without using excessive force.

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Was there any evidence of an ink leak?

Make sure the tubes have ink in them leading up to the carriage. And I believe you can get more specific printhead error info through the web interface: Generate the Service plot. Go to the Embedded Web Server: Support tab > Service support > Printer information. This will open a new page. Select the All pages tab. Download this page or print it to a PDF file. Look for the Printhead Kit Info. The errors are explained in the service manual.

Do the ink cartridges have sufficient ink in them?

Run the primer motor test. It's under the Service Station menu in the diagnostics.

Try an incremental purge. Make sure the ink cartridges have at least 100ml of ink in them AND the firmware is up to date! Go into Service Menu (3174)>Svc Utilities>Purge Tubes. Once you are inside of the Purge Tubes menu, select INCREMENTAL PURGE (code 5494). It will try and pump ink again in the current printhead.

No idea on the 81:01 error when trying to go into the service menu. Sounds more like a bug to me.

Kiran