Reset and Maintain your Epson L Series (Ink Tank) Printer

Today, I am gonna share with you how easy and cheap you can maintain and reset your Epson L series Ink tank printer. I spent some time, as I was experimenting with a lot of stuff, but in the end, you need just around an hour (even minutes) to reset the printer and maintain it!

In my previous post a couple of weeks ago, I analyzed a more technical aspect of how to “Dockerize Python GUI Apps”. However, this need came from the fact that I had issues with my printer. How are these 2 connected? Let me explain..

Epson Ink Tank Printers were first introduced around 2014, and back then as I remember it was the first company that did such an innovation. Although, Ink tank printers have a plethora of advantages by having ink tanks, there is just one small disadvantage. Maintenance.

As the printer uses liquid ink directly to the printer head, there is an additional tank in the back of the printer which is responsible to absorb all the ink that is spilt from the whole mechanism, in order to deliver properly the printed papers (and not filled with extra ink around it). The printer head as well as the tank itself needs to be maintained, cleaned and reset the printer (counter) after some thousands of printing.

So this means two things: Reset the software AND maintain it physically.

Back in the days, this was a black box. I remember everybody saying to me “Oh Maria but you bought a printer that needs maintenance, and you should send it to the company, and this will cost you a fortune etc”. And of course internet in 2014 didn’t have ANY information available on how to do it yourself. I was lucky back then, as I had found a way to “soft reset” the printer a couple of times (believe it took each time at least 2 hours until I had succeeded), but still that wasn’t something easy for me, and I was overwhelmed every time the button combination was not working!

“How the Python GUI App post is connected?”

Well, I needed recently to maintain my printer properly. It reached the paper limit again, and I was not able to soft reset it. But also, I have never maintained the printer itself (clean the internal tank etc), and as a result after a couple of pages, I could see on the corners additional ink spilled. So I started searching over the internet, on how to do to maintain it and what exactly I can do.

First I found this guy that he successfully cleaned his printer, and replaced some parts internally. A very thorough guide, and my printer maintenance was based on this post. However, this guide mentions a software reset tool, which I was not able to use as my laptop recognized it as something unsafe, and to be honest, I was not very confident for this one as well.

So, I continued searching over the internet and I found another guy with an open-source solution he has on his GitHub page. Amazing tool, it did its job, but because this “reset” button you need it just once per some years (depending on your printer usage), and I don’t want to start searching again why the tool is not working (imagine that everything is being upgraded every couple of weeks), I thought maybe is better to dockerize it, have it there to my personal Docker Hub repository, and whoever wants it, you can use it!

The actual guide

Below you will find the steps mentioned, and some of them are just copy-paste from the resources I found, just for the ease of this post. But you can also see the thorough guide here.

So all in all, the steps are the following (The steps are specifically for the L355, but I think in general it is the same context)

The Epson L355 has a conspicuous screw on the back. Just unscrew it, which releases the waste ink tank. It can then be removed by gently sliding it out.
As you open it, you see the reservoir, which is actually a tray filled with felt, which serves to soak up the ink splashed.
You buy the felt from an online store. I found it on AliExpress very cheap and with x2 sets in the package. When the package arrives, you might see that the felt is not exactly the same cut as the used one. Don’t worry, as all of the cut felts are going to fill in the place when the printer will start splashing again the internal tank.
Then to reset the counter of your printer, you can do one of the following:
- 1 Run through Docker the Reset Tool App (The guide is specifically for MacOS)
  - Prerequirements: Docker, TigerVNC
  - 1. Install Tiger VNC Viewer brew install tigervnc-viewer
  - 2. Download Docker Image docker pull mvoreakou/epson-god-mode:latest
  - 3. App rundocker run --rm --publish 5990:5990 --env HOME=/ mvoreakou/epson-god-mode x11vnc -usepw -create
  - 4. Open GUI
    Open tiger VNC that was installed on your mac, and fill
    VNC server: localhost:5990
  - Click Connect & voila!
  - Reset your printer
  - Close the app, and restart the printer
    
    Or
- 2 Run it natively
  - Install it through GitHub
  - Run it! python ui.py
  - Reset your printer
  - Close the app, and restart the printer

I hope that you liked this article! If you have any question or anything you might want to mention, feel free to contact me!

Talk to you soon! Till then bye!! 🙂