ELM 205
-
Technical reference -
Rev. G -
12
Advanced Printing Systems
MaxPFS gives a time (by inverting) called SLT (scanning line time). In this time, the head must
be activated. If this time is not long enough, MaxPS will be subsequently affected.
Then, the way of driving the head is a critical point in the thermal printing application. There
are basically two ways of limiting the current in the head.:
1. Divide the head into fixed blocks (by 64 dots for example) and use the strobe lines to
control the blocks to be activated. In this case. It is easy to implement but the printing speed
will be very slow because the MaxPS will be the invert of the activation time times the
number of blocks the head is divided in.
Example: at 6 volts with the ELM205ST, the activation time is 2.53ms*(25/36) =
1.76ms. If the maximum current available for the head is 2.4A, the maximum number of
dots to be simultaneously activated will be 2.4Amps/(6volts/160Ohms)=64 dots. So the
number of activation per SLT will be 384/64=6, giving a SLT of 6*1.76ms=10.6ms.
then MaxPS will be 1/(8*10.6ms) = 11.8 mm/s. And MaxPFS is 62mm/s. So there is a
big margin and the printing speed is relatively slow.
2. Divide the head dynamically, by counting the number of dots actually activated. The
software is counting while loading the printhead, the actual number of “black” dots. When
the number of black dots has reached the maximum value (in this example the value will be
64) the software will fill the remaining dots with “0” and activates the strobes line. Doing
so the activation will be always done with the maximum number of black dots allowed, so
optimizing the number of times the head needs to be activated. Printing standard text, the
average number of black dots is usually less than 64 and sometimes reach 128.
Example: In the same conditions of the previous example, MaxPS will be
multiplied by 6, or sometimes by 3. Let take that 30% of the lines contains from 64 to
128 black dots, the average MaxPS will be (62(#))*0.7 + (11.8*3)*0.3 = 60.2 mm/s,
getting very close to the MaxPFS, and optimizing all the parameters.
(#) : we take 62 because 11.8*6 =70.8 > MaxPFS.