Hacking the Samsung CLP-315

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

Hello World! Chronicles of an OK programmer

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer Posted on March 4, 2012 I am the happy owner of a Samsung CLP-315 laser CLP-315 laser printer. It is a fantastic printer for the price. Things were going great until it came time to replace the toner. At the time, the price of a full set of toner cartridges was around $150. To put things in perspective, the printer itself could be acquired for less on eBay. eBay. Not being the type of person who so easily bends to the will of “The Man”, I set out on a journey to find a cheaper source of toner. A “journey”? Really? As it turns out, the answer is yes but in the end it was worth it. This is going to be a long post, so strap yourself in. If you’d prefer to cheat, you can skip straight to the good stuff. stuff. How Stuff Works

Since I last purchased a laser printer (my circa 2001 LaserJet 1200 is 1200 is still kicking) the industry has changed. Imagine that!? Apparently, it is now common practice for printers and even toner cartridges themselves to count the number of pages that have been printed in order to track the consumption of toner. The printers then use these page counts to project  how  how much toner remains in the cartridge. To my knowledge, the cartridges don’t have a way to sense  how  how much toner remains. Why does this matter, you ask? Essentially, it would be like having a gas gauge in your car that only tracked how far you had driven, not how much gasoline was left in the tank. Depending on several factors (driving style, load, tire pressure, etc), the amount of fuel consumed in a mile can vary wildly. The end result; you either waste gas, or run out. Neither is good. The same can be said for the way modern laser printers track toner. This causes two problems. First, toner is likely being wasted (which irks me). Second, refilling the cartridges with toner purchased in bulk does nothing to reset the accumulated page count. It is like putting gasoline in your tank, but not being able to start the car until the odometer is reset. Knowing all this, the only thing standing between me and cheap toner refills was refills was finding a way to reset the counters. Unsurprisingly, I am not the first person to try to address this problem. In fact, there is plenty of published hackery surrounding this printer. Not wanting to start from scratch, I got to reading. What I discovered is that the page counts are all stored on an EEPROM chip that is attached to an I²C I²C bus  bus (an ST M24C64, M24C64, in this case). If

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

that last sentence meant nothing to you, you might want to skip to the “Reset Procedure” section… It is going to get technical for a while. Sniffing

After doing some homework, I decided to try watching the I²C traffic with a logic analyzer to analyzer to see what memory locations were getting updated on the EEPROM after each print. I was able to catch the first handful of writes, but there were so many that I decided to take a slightly different approach. I wrote an Arduino sketch to sketch to dump the entire memory of the EEPROM to the serial port. This allowed me to see a before and after memory snapshot. So, I would dump the EEPROM, print a page, and dump it again. I then compared the outputs using a diff program. I looked specifically for writes that looked like they incremented a value. Like I had suspected, there were lots of locations that were incrementing. Great! The next thing I did was print off the printer’s “Configuration Report”. This is done by holding down The Button  until the green light flashes rapidly. This report includes several counts, including the counts for our toner cartridges and the printer itself. By searching the dump file for these numbers (after converting them to hex), I was able to track down which memory locations were used to store which counts. Now I had a list of memory locations that (I assumed) stored the page counts. I could use another Arduino sketch to write zeros back into those locations. Using our analogy from before, I hoped this would reset the “odometer” and register the tank as full. I was able to successfully write zeros to all of the incrementing memory locations. Unfortunately, after printing the configuration report again, the “Toner Remaining” percentage hadn’t updated for any of the cartridges. Also, the low-toner warning lights remained lit for all colors. Apparently that percentage is a stored value, not one that is calculated on the fly based on the page count. If the numbers were stored as floating points, this could explain why they were harder to see, as they may not have changed by exactly 1 like the page counts did. I needed a better way to analyze and flash the entire address space on the EEPROM. I hooked up my Bus Pirate to the I²C bus, and was going to start writing some software to accomplish this. Here is where things got really  interesting … The Discovery

I rebooted the printer with the Bus Pirate connected (I don’t remember which mode I had it in), and it took a really long time to start-up. I ran the configuration report and it had mysteriously zeroed or erased every field. All values, serial numbers, dates, and counts were blank or zero. I was terrified that I had bricked my printer! So, I disconnected the Bus Pirate and printed another configuration report. Everything looked as I had left it with one exception. Now, the black toner cartridge registered zero pages and  100%  100% remaining toner. And the warning light for the black toner was off… Eureka! (I didn’t really say that, but I think I did run and show my wife who said “That’s nice, honey”. I’m such a nerd.) So what happened, and how could I now make it happen for the color cartridges, too? I hooked up the scope to

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

the SDA and SCL lines of the bus so I could watch what was happening while booting with the Bus Pirate connected. After a couple of tries, I noticed that the SDA line was being held low by the Bus Pirate (like I said, I’m not sure what mode I had it in). I could see the clock line getting toggled as it booted, but holding the data line low seemed to be interrupting the flow of data between the EEPROM and the main processor. I can only assume that when this happens during a boot up, all of the count variables are left initialized to zero in the main processor’s memory. So, the idea struck me. What if I interrupt the communications during boot (letting the in-memory values initialize to zero), but then print a page and see if it would run the same incrementing logic and write 1s for the page counts back to the EEPROM. Is double eureka a thing? It worked. All toner levels, page counts, image counts and everything had been written back to the EEPROM as if they had started at zero.

Original

After Hack

After Print

After Reboot

Reset Procedure

After printing a few more pages (and giggling like a child to the wife), I was able to refine the reset process a bit. Here are the steps to perform the reset: 1. Open the printer and printer and solder a wire to the SDA pin of the EEPROM (see video below ) 2. Power up the printer with this line held to ground until it finishes initializing A. You can use chassis near the USB port is an easy spot to ground to. B. The printer will take longer than normal to initialize; don’t be alarmed  3. Disconnect the SDA line from ground 4. Print the demo page by pushing The Button  until  until you see a slowly blinking green light (about 2 seconds) 5. Print the configuration page by pushing The Button  until  until you see a rapidly blinking green light (about 6 seconds)

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

6. Turn off the power 7. Turn on the power, and wait for it to initialize 8. Print the configuration report again 9. All your base are belong to us Notes

One thing worth noting; my printer still has its original toner cartridges which are “chipless”. Retail replacement cartridges have a chip with its own EEPROM that has a unique identifier and  stores its own count. Since I don’t have toner cartridges with these chips, I don’t know (but I suspect) that a different approach or additional steps may be necessary to reset the counts. You may be able to tape off the exposed pads on the toner chips before performing this procedure and get the same effect, but I haven’t got the chipped cartridges to test with. (nor will I be buying any for $150!) YMMV. Demo Time!

 Conclusion

It took some time to get there, but I think it was worth the effort. This printer is now happily kicking out full-color pages for 2¢ versus a whopping 15¢ (ouch). Life is good. Enjoy! This entry was posted in Hacks and tagged Arduino, CLP-315, Hack, I2C, Printer by Brian. Bookmark the permalink [http://rumburg.org/printerhack/] . 76 THOUGHTS ON “HACKING THE SAMSUNG CLP-315 LASER PRINTER”

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

Pingback: Resetting the page count on a laser printer - Hack a Day

Mad Professor on March 5, 2012 at 1:21 pm said:

I have a Samsung CLP-300N, and it uses a PDIP Package: ATMEL 24C64A eeprom, in a socket. One of my toners was showing as empty, but if you remove the eeprom chip and power on the printer, it takes longer to boot up, but like your video shows it resets eveything, and is able to print, but as soon as you put the chip back it, and power cycle the printer, it then shows the toner is empty again. For now I am just going to leave the eeprom chip out.

brian on March 5, 2012 at 3:14 pm said:

It sounds like pulling the SDA line low might work for your printer, too. Let me know how it goes if you decide to give it a try!

Karel on March 25, 2012 at 2:11 pm said:

I tried doing it (CLP-300), but now it wont do anything at all anymore. (No LED lights, and the roller only turns 5degrees and makes a click. This time the wife wasnt to happy with me >_<

steve eh on March 5, 2012 at 1:57 pm said:

Thank you, my toner lights have been blinking for a little while now, i’ve been contemplating what to do about it

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

This is great news

steve eh on March 5, 2012 at 2:07 pm said:

ohh and oddly enough when i told my wife about this she said…”that’s nice Honey” and possibly rolled her eyes at my infinite nerdness

brian on March 5, 2012 at 3:15 pm said:

Hah! My wife will never fully understand my inner geek. Good luck!

mistahk

on March 6, 2012 at 3:28 pm said:

Hi, I remember fighting with my toner for a while (got hp p1005) for me it was enough to tape both pins of a chip and run the printer.., than take the tape off and it worked later without any probs. My toner is almost finished so I will try it again this time.

elamoriaek on March 6, 2012 at 3:55 pm said:

My friend this trick is simply brilliant! Just made my old printer ready for refilling. Many many thanks.

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

brian on March 6, 2012 at 4:02 pm said:

Awesome! I’m so glad it helped!

Jeremy

on March 6, 2012 at 4:45 pm said:

Nice work, but how do you know when your other cartridges run low if you’re wiping all of them at once? The color carts don’t have chips in them, even the factory ones. There has to be another trigger to reset the print count on a per cartridge basis.

brian on March 6, 2012 at 5:01 pm said:

You nailed it. This particular hack can only reset ALL counts at once. This has some obvious drawbacks. In my case, all the toner lights were blinking, so… Regarding missing chips in the color toner cartridges, it is my understanding that only the cartridges that ship with a new printer (ie, the factory ones) are “chipless”. If you purchase any color of retail replacement cartridge, it will likely have a chip in it that stores a unique ID and a count. There is undoubtedly a way to reset the counts for a single cartridge, but I only got about halfway there before discovering this hack which worked fine for my purposes (and was much less involved). If you feel like continuing the search, I have links above to the EEPROM dump and write arduino sketches I was playing with at the time. Good luck!

Jeremy

on March 6, 2012 at 5:38 pm said:

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

Well I have a refill kit coming, my yellow cart is almost done and my cyan and magenta are next. I think I’m going to purchase a Samsung cart from Staples and check it for a chip. If it has one, I’ll see what all it has stored in it. Each of the carts has a corresponding set of 4 pins connecting to it. I was able to identify the ground pin, but all three of the rest just give a 3.3v positive feed. Two of those three have to be some kind of data in data out and given it’s 3.3v I’m inclined to think it’s either SPI or I2C bus. I tried just experimenting with the pins to see if I could get a reset out of it, but it seems as though anything I did to the yellow carts pins also effected the black (which has a chip). So apparent all the carts are serial connected and probably get distinguished through a chip ID or serial number. This should be fun.

brian on March 6, 2012 at 5:44 pm said:

I found this site when researching this hack. It didn’t apply to my situation, but it may interest you. http://clp-300.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-toprogram-your-permanent-reset.html If all else fails, you can try to tape off the chip insulating it from the pogo pins on the front cover and run the hack from my post. I’m still curious if it will work after you have printed with a chipped toner cartridge.

Jeremy

on March 6, 2012 at 6:11 pm said:

Yeah I saw that site, but it refers to the older CLP-300 model which is similar, but the carts are laid out differently. From what I’ve read of the service manual for the CLP-310/315 it sounds

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

like things are about the same with newer hardware. I’ll keep you posted on where I get with this.

bilt on March 10, 2012 at 6:12 pm said:

I have got the wireless version the clp-315w. The processor board looks slightly different. There is a ST 4256BWP instead of the M24C64. I tried your method before noticing the different chip. The boot up sequence lasted along time but when finished the status led flashed orange. On reboot everything still worked but no totals were changed. I’ll try to get the datasheet for the 4256 to see what pin I was grounding (pin5). Thought you would like to know.

brian on March 10, 2012 at 8:53 pm said:

Good to know. I don’t have a 315w to play with and I have been curious what the differences are. I did a quick search for the 4256bwp datasheet and came up empty. Have you had any luck finding one? The problem with the approach I took in this post is that it is completely dependent on how the firmware behaves when an EEPROM read failure occurs. In my case I was lucky that it failed gracefully enough to allow you to print afterward. Hopefully you can find some info on that EEPROM and start digging in. If grounding the SDA line on boot doesn’t work, you are in for some interesting times. Good luck!

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

bilt on March 10, 2012 at 9:59 pm said:

I found the data sheet it on ST Micro site under M24256-BW. Looks like I was grounding the SDA pin. I think I’ll try the Turkish ebay chip. Also I was reading on another forum, if your counters have not passed 1000. If you lift pin7 and jumper it to pin 8 your counters won’t increase. It’s supposed to disable write access to the eeprom.

brian on March 11, 2012 at 12:04 am said:

I initially used the write protect pin hack (lifting the WC pin and pulling it high) on my printer and it did work for me. Unfortunately, I had already passed the threshold that caused the low toner lights to illuminate. The blinking lights are what motivated me to start mapping the EEPROM memory so I could write 0s back into the appropriate locations to “fix the glitch”. I stumbled across the hack documented in this post before I finished mapping all of the pertinent memory locations. Good luck in your endeavor and thanks for the new information! I hope the Turkish ebay chip works out for you. If you do decide to dig a bit deeper into the information stored on your EEPROM, there is a link in the post to the Arduino sketch I used to dump the memory on mine. At a glance, it looks like the code would only need to be adjusted for the increased memory size. Enjoy!

Tek1229 on March 15, 2012 at 9:06 pm said:

I also have the CLP-315W.. I also have the 42568wp chip but your method worked first try for me!!! I wonder if bilt didn’t print the demo and config page to update the counter?? If I am reading your

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

explanation correctly it can’t read the counters upon starting up with the pin shorted it assumes a count of zero but doesn’t write to the chip just yet.. You then unground the pin and print a page, this writes 1 to the page count, thereby resetting it to 1.. Anyways, Awesome find!!!!! I just did a temporary jumper but I am installing a switch tomorrow before re-assembling.. Tek

brian on March 16, 2012 at 9:32 am said:

AWESOME. (c:

Javy1389 on March 27, 2012 at 5:02 pm said:

can some some one with a 315w show me how they solder to the chip and where they got ground from. thanks

Javy1389 on March 22, 2012 at 4:51 pm said:

I own a 315w too and i was looking into doing this and i was wondering if it was possible for you to pose a picture of what you did.

brian on March 23, 2012 at 11:17 am said:

I found a picture of the hack before it was finished. I have added it to the gallery in this post and have also posted a higher resolution image here: http://rumburg.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03  /PrinterHack.jpg

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

There are arrows pointing to the SDA pin and the ground solder point I used. Hope this helps!

Hiraga Saito

on March 23, 2012 at 12:21 am said:

Hi, I donot understand the english at all, but I have the idea to how to do that, and I make it, and I said the same as you: EUREKA!, I have too many problems cuz, mi CLP-315 is OCT-10-2009 Model, and it have protection about your hack, I was need to discover by my way how to solve it, and finally, the CLP-315 was hacked, well my comment, is for give to you the thanks for your tutorial, first i was thinking to make a jumper between pin 8 and 7, to activate the write protection, but your method is best, well, i think its all, sorry for my bad english, and greetings from méxico!, I repeat: Thank You Very Much! see ya!

brian on March 23, 2012 at 11:24 am said:

I’m so glad this helped you. Thank you for the kind feedback! (c:

nat on March 24, 2012 at 12:51 pm said:

Hi Brian, Thanks for sharing this. Worked a treat on my CLX-3170FN – I had to do a different process to restore the factory settings (via the menu), and instead of printing a demo page (doesn’t seem to be one on the CLX-3170), I did this: Short out the pins as you describe (I shorted pins 4 and 5 with some test probes – 4 being ground) while the printer boots.

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

Then do this procedure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mEeXaiIs8c then just hit the copy-colour button. re-set network settings, manually set IP addres. Reboot. Job’s a good’un. All counters reset. (I printed out the actual numbers before I did this for my own records) I also fitted a push-button as you did so I won’t have to open it up next time. This is BETTER THAN A RESET CHIP because, as I understand it, with the reset chips, you often have to do some silly procedure each time the printer is power cycled – not so with this method – only when you want to reset everything again. I’ve ordered some toner refill from ebay in Germany for something silly like £3 for all 4 toner bottles. makes this cheap little printer super cheap to run! (i’ve had mine since 2008 and it’s still working well – I was still on my original colour carts, and only my second black cart – note that I’ve swapped back to my original black cart since I did the reset – I suspect if I had kept the black toner cart with the chip in, it would have remembered the black was running out – to get around this, I’d have had to put some tape over the chip or removed the chip – then it would look to the printer like it was the chip-less cart) You’re a hero. n.

brian on March 26, 2012 at 2:16 pm said:

Excellent. This is a great success story. Thanks for sharing!

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

francois on April 26, 2012 at 12:41 pm said:

Hello, I omn a clx-3175fn too and i was looking into doing this and i was wondering if it was possible for you to pose a picture of what you did. thank jou

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

zack free on March 27, 2012 at 6:31 pm said:

I have to say this worked 100% with my CLP-315w, even with the 42568wp chip. All I did was popped the cover and fasten one end of the wire to the ground screw and held the other end at top left leg of the chip. One thing is the chip on the 315w is to the right more but it is the same leg you picture in your photo. Second: I taped over the chips on the Toner cartridges to simulate his procedure. Total time to cycle while shorting out the leg is about 45 seconds, so if you do not have a steady hand I would solder. I didn’t have any luck soldering on the wire so that is why I did it this way. But I will confirm again, This works on a 315w w/ OS Version v1:00.01.28.x Jan 13 2009, all back to 100%, After printing an info sheet, just as described, powered off and back on & all is back to normal with 100% just like the day I bought it. BRRRRRRAAAAAVVVVOOO I spent days researching and was almost going to buy the resetter on Ebay or buy Firmware Fix, FORGET IT, this works for sure! Best of luck everybody!!!!

brian on March 27, 2012 at 8:03 pm said:

That’s two successful resets reported on the CLP-315W by my count. Thanks for documenting your experience here!

Javy1389 on March 28, 2012 at 12:39 am said:

i want to thank everyone for their help and im here to say i am now one of the 315w with a successful reset

Ryan Gibson

on March 28, 2012 at 3:52 am said:

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

Hey, This is a great hack. I bet Samsung never expected this type of printer hack

Do you have an email I can contact you on? Love

your work and want to throw past a few ideas to you. Thanks Ryan

Joey Jan on April 4, 2012 at 11:13 pm said:

I have a clp-315 and used this hack successfully with chipped cartridges. I have the chips taped up, then did your hack and all my cartridges are now showing 100% and 1 page count! So happy this worked, i bought the same ebay toner as you, but didn’t realized i had chipped cartridges, but this made it work fine so i guess if the printer has less than 1k pages it doesn’t need the cartridge chips.

brian on April 5, 2012 at 2:51 pm said:

So glad that this hack helped you out. I have noticed that the color of cheap replacement toner isn’t quite as rich, but to me it is totally worth the savings. Thanks for the feedback!

Joey jan on April 5, 2012 at 3:14 pm said:

I have a photo printer for images i need to look good. For me the extend of color printed is pie charts and line graphs so 20$ cant be beat. I plan on opening the printer back up and doing this to it http://fcartegnie.free.fr/lines/?p=25

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

It will write protect the eeprom and then i wont even need the switch anymore.

brian on April 5, 2012 at 3:46 pm said:

I am familiar with that post and have successfully applied the method to my printer (it was the first hack I tried, in fact). For me, it was more useful for the page counters to continue working after the hack so I know when it is time to think about ordering toner. Since the counters are so easy to reset, I left the write protect pin as-is. Thanks for the link!

John on April 6, 2012 at 1:14 am said:

I already tried the hack about 20 days ago on two printers. I first tried it on my 2nd 315 (the same board with yours). The red led was already for black toner (about 700p printed, 2% remaining). The CMY toners were about20-30 pages 85-90% remaining – I used the printer usually for black text pages). So, the hack didn’t worked at all, Obviously because of the “on” flag for “empty” initial black cartridge. At the start of progress (after 5-10 seconds) the green led turned orange (or red?) , anyway I continued keeping the two points joint but with no luck at the end. Tried and 2nd time, the same. Then I tried on my 1st – older 315, different board, but the same 24c64 chip. Toner levels were fine there, all above 50%, page counters about 300-400 on all toners, with no red led and empty toner flag. (initial toners there, too). The hack there worked perfect like your video shows.

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

I guess that if a flag of empty toner is on, then the hack doesn’t work, maybe because some register value has changed. Someone with empty toner led on could also “confirm” my assumption. (you can remove these posts of me from youtube, as I just visited this page, saw the comments and thought here is the place to be. Also sorry for my bad English)

Thank you very much for one more time brian!

brian on April 7, 2012 at 11:50 pm said:

When I started this project, the solid red light was on for the black toner and it still worked for me. Does your toner cartridge have a chip? If so, you might try putting tape over the contacts and running the hack again. As always, your mileage may vary, try at your own risk… Good luck!

Javy1389 on April 8, 2012 at 12:39 am said:

my black toner had over 1000 pages on it but i put tape on it and the hack work just fine

John on April 8, 2012 at 3:06 am said:

As I said at the middle of my previous comment all eight cartridges are initial, no chip on them, so all the data are stored at printer’s board. So it is strange that worked for you but not for me. Obvious must be a difference on model – version. Here is some data/feedback of my two black clp-315 I own: Hack worked on the older one : OS version V1.29.01.23 engine version 1.77.74.T(55) Hack didn’t worked on newer one: OS version V1.29.11.52 engine version 0.00.61.T(55)

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

SPL-C version is the same on both. Model name on configuration report: older = CLP-310 series / Newer = CLP-310 series (V)

Tapani on June 24, 2012 at 8:26 am said:

I tried this hack with my clp-315. Hack didn’t work for my printer. I also have these versions on my printer: OS version V1.29.11.52 engine version 0.00.61.T(55)

JJ

on April 8, 2012 at 10:01 pm said:

Worked like a champ! Thanks!

Gaasman on April 10, 2012 at 10:45 am said:

Great hack. I have 2 clp 315w and 2 clp300. I just followed the instruction and twist a wire wrap wire around pin 5 and touched ground/ metal on boot up. Wait for three blinks and release. Didn’t even install a momentary switch. Print color demo page and done. All zeroed. Now I just buy clp 300 toners from Amazon for $23 set of four with clp 300 chips. Take the left over clp 300 toner and dump that in clp 315w. Unlimited printing. Thanks again…

brian on April 10, 2012 at 10:58 am said:

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

W00t. Bulk hacking! (c:

amit on April 16, 2012 at 9:46 pm said:

i have a CLP-315W and i was having some issues where the printer would go in standby and only way to bring it back was restart. i figured i do a firmware upgrade. i did and after doing that the printer is not being recognized by my pc or the light on the printer wont go on. only hear a click when i turn it off. any way to redo the firmware or anything i can do to bring printer back to life? please help.

Ray on April 25, 2012 at 5:35 pm said:

Hi Tried to update firmware on CLP-315W via USB and apparently bricked printer…any idea how I can recover?

Christian-Marco on May 13, 2012 at 9:38 am said:

Hey guys! I tried it on my CLX-3175FN. It works if you never used toner with chip. Once i bought new toner for my printer (color). The black toner is resetted (100%) and nearly all other counters. Problems: all 3 color toner & AVE-Scan-Counter. Any idea? Important @ CLX-3175FN [firmware V1.29.01.57.FN]: reset everything by using tech-menu (#1934).

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

RG on May 15, 2012 at 8:35 am said:

Hey guys, thanks for all the info. I will be trying this on my 315w soon and just wanted to know if any toner is better quality-wise than others out there or are they all about the same? My cartridges are original, chipless. My black is at 18%, Yellow at 47%, Magenta 62% and Cyan 55%. Having never refilled toner I’m assuming I can just refill partway as well? Thanks again!

brian on May 15, 2012 at 11:59 am said:

The bulk color toner that I purchased from eBay wasn’t quite as bright/rich as the Samsung toner. It still looked fine, just not quite as vibrant. The black toner wasn’t quite as dark, but it was barely noticeable. Regarding partial refill, my cartridges were nearly empty when I refilled. I did notice a strange stain-like effect that I assume was the two toners mixing. For me, this effect has since disappeared over time. If it were me, I would wait until the toner is as empty as possible before refilling to minimize this effect. Hope this helps!

Tom on May 15, 2012 at 10:31 pm said:

Hi Brian, Thanks for this great tip! I have a Samsung CLP-315w which I just finished hacking and it now works better than ever. I had basically the same experience as Zack Free. It had the 4256BWP chip; I soldered a wire to the top left pin; attached another wire to the top right motherboard screw; I attached both of those to a switch that I picked up at Circuit City (formerly

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

Radio Shack). Then I taped the switch to the motherboard right next to the ethernet port and filed out a slot in the plastic casing right through the power button opening and into the unused space above the ethernet port. Then finally I popped the casing back on and screwed on the switch’s on/off faceplate. I also stuck a little piece of cardboard in the black toner contacts. I was motivated to take on this project because my printer had stopped printing. It would still print out the info pages but only if you used the web interface; holding the button for 6 seconds did nothing. Way back when I installed the first replacement black (authentic Samsung) toner it didn’t reset the counters, so the ink level still showed 0%. Every time I printed for over a year it complained that my ink levels were low, until a few weeks ago—at 2453 black pages and my second black replacement toner—it stopped printing. Booting with the ground-hack on set all levels to 100% and all page counts to 1 as expected. Then rebooting with the ground-hack off left only the black level at 100% (page count 3). Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan remained as they were before at 48% (page count 523). Perhaps this is because I am still on my original colour toners. Anyway, everything seems to be working great. Main Firmware Version : V1.01.01.23.W Sep-17-2008 Network Firmware Version : V4.01.01(CLP-310W) 06-03-2008 Engine Firmware Version : 1.77.74 SPL Firmware Version : SPL-C 5.35 11-20-2007 Thanks for all the help.

Nick Higgins on May 24, 2012 at 8:51 am said:

Thanks for this. Can confirm it works on a CLP-320. Also resets the drum counter which is what i was trying to do. Drum counter reset and emptied and printer is working again. Cheers.

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

brian on May 24, 2012 at 9:12 am said:

Awesome. I love hearing other’s success stories. Thanks!

DanielS on May 31, 2012 at 12:22 pm said:

@Nick Higgins: can you tell us the firmware version on your CLP-320? I have seen reports that this hack doesn’t work on CLP-32x series, maybe Samsung “fixed” this in newer firmwares.

Abraham on June 6, 2012 at 12:27 am said:

I wanted to help out some people hacking the CLP-315w. At first I had problems performing the hack since I got all the led on after 3 blinking, I went and grounded the pin only for the first 3 blinks, after that I took off the ground and waited for the 45 sec cycle. After that I printed out the configuration page and all had 100% Cool I said to my self I´ll show my wife, buy after turning off the printer and starting it back again all the values except for the black one went back to original %, black was 100%. I tried it again, same procedure but the only diference I made was that after printing the configuration page I printed out the sample page by pressing the triangle for just a couple of seconds, this in fact did the reset of all the cartridges!!!!! Thanls for the hack and saving all of us some money.

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

brian on June 6, 2012 at 9:03 am said:

I was roadblocked on the color toner levels myself for awhile when working on this hack. Glad it worked out for you! (c:

Alan_F

on June 9, 2012 at 11:15 am said:

Hi Brian great hack, but one thing to mention i did it how you said on the video, but i later realised you dont wait till it has finished making a noise, on mine i had to do the three blinks of the main green light (which is orange for the first two times blinking. then it worked a treat, i am on a CLP 315 which is dated 2010 and with the (v) after the name  just so it helps! and cheers Brian ALan

Wes_B on June 11, 2012 at 4:24 pm said:

I have Sammy CLP-315 (v) manufacture date Feb 2010.This method worked for me. Originally it wasn’t working till I saw Gaasman post about the “THREE BLINKS” and released the ground. I will probably add a switch in the near future. Thanks everyone, your going to save me a ton of money. BTW I was over 1100 on black and cyan and 600 on the others.

nick h

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

on June 11, 2012 at 4:33 pm said:

this is the same method i used for the clp 320. i had 6 in work all with the drum on max usage. when they get like this it was cheaper to buy a new printer than buy a new drum. all 6 are now working again by shorting pin 4 to ground. i bought a toner replacement soldering iron. made a hole in the drum and emptied the waste toner away and pluged the hole with a gromet. printers are as good as new.

AB on June 15, 2012 at 10:52 am said:

This data zeroing is really a great idea (wonder what condition would have the manufacturer thought to allow this?!). I’m going to try the hack and report back on my CLP-310N. However, just one comment on the method of estimating the toner consumption. The processor could also look on actual page data and estimate the color/black density. A recent post of a fellow having mostly black consumption reported correctly, indicates that there is not only about, the page count, accompanied by a statistical ratio. Eager to try the hack…

Dai101 on June 15, 2012 at 1:24 pm said:

GREAT!!!!!!! I just bougth one of this used and the drum is above 50% of it’s capacity. Thanks to this i can reset it and keep printing. THANKS!!! Greetings from Mexico.

Nolan on June 19, 2012 at 11:44 pm said:

Just tried this on two CLP-315w printers I have. The first one with

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

firmware V1.01.01.28.W Jan-13-2009 worked great and all counters are now back at 0. The second printer has firmware version V1.01.01.60.W Mar-25-2010 and the reset trick did not work. The printer did take longer to boot but the status light turned red about halfway through and stayed that way, not allowing me to print the demo page. In the first printer I had been through a set of toner and refilled and stuck chips on each one that I got from 123refills in addition to an OEM black toner cartridge from samsung. Simply removing the chips from these allowed the hack to work in the first printer.

kiki604 on June 23, 2012 at 9:27 am said:

Brian thank you for your great work It works on a clp315, OS version v1.00.11.53.X October-10-2009

002xM on June 24, 2012 at 1:48 pm said:

I have two CLP-315w. I was able to reset the counter on one of my by pulling SDA low during startup. I noticed that the ST 4256BWP chip’s rotated 180deg from what was shown in the photos of the CLP-315 s ′ 

board. As far as I can tell, pin 1 indicated by a small dot, is upper left, making SDA, pin 5, at lower right. By resetting the eeprom, all of my wireless settings were reset, including MAC address. I tried using the set IP utility to restore the MAC, but it’s not accepting. I might try on my other -315W, but having two devices with 0000000000 MAC might be a bad idea..

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

002xM on June 24, 2012 at 1:53 pm said:

By the way, my OS version is V1.00.01.14.X Jun-02-2008. It also looks like the USB serial number is cleared.

Levi on June 25, 2012 at 10:03 pm said:

Brian, I followed your steps and I get all of my toner LEDs lighting up red instead of green. I can not print a test page and send a new value to the eeprom so when I reboot everthing is back to the way it was. I have tried this a few times now and everything is as you describe right up until it finishes booting (takes about a minute with SDA held to ground) and I noticed that all the toner lights stay red and it won’t respond. I noticed the John had this same problem in March. Update: I got it to work by holding the SDA to ground ONLY until the LED light turns green then you MUST remove it from ground for my model or all the LEDs turn red and it will not respond (so you can not write to the EEPROM). It still takes a long time to boot, but you do not have to have the SDA connected to ground while it finishes booting. My model info: OS version V1.01.11.52 engine version 0.00.61.T(55) SPL-C version 5.35 11-20-2007 Once I successfully wrote to the EEPROM the page count was not the only number changed. Mine now reads: engine version 0.00.61.T(0)

Tapani on June 26, 2012 at 10:53 am said:

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

I had these vesions: OS version V1.29.11.52 May-01-2009 engine version 0.00.61.T(55) SPL-C version 5.35 11-20-2007 I did like you did, pulling sda to ground only untill the led goes green first time. I had my toner remaining counter like this before the hack: Yellow: 43% Magnenta: 45% Cyan: 18% Black: 0% After I did this procedure I had all counters 100%. But after restarting, toner counters were like before hack execpt the Black which was 100%. All other counters were also reseted.

Alejandro on July 5, 2012 at 4:05 pm said:

Hi Brian, I have a CLP-325 you don’t have a clue if this hack works for me too, im afraid to mist up my printer hahahah in fact I have two, one at work and another at my hose and Im tiered of using ink printers and now geting poor with the toner hahahah, by the way, god job with the reserch ang the explicity of the post. (NOTE: Im in Guatemala and here the toner’s price is around $200 the set.)

Brian on July 5, 2012 at 4:10 pm said:

I wish I could say I knew that it would work on the CLP-325, but I don’t have one to work with. Sorry! If you decide to look into it yourself, let me know how it goes! (c:

Dave on July 12, 2012 at 10:44 pm said:

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

Brian, I’ve got a clp-325w/xac model (actually (2) of them now… I’ve opened one up and am looking for this eeprom (42568wp chip or a 24c64 chip ?) but don’t see it . I’m assuming that this would be still be an eight leg chip? And would follow that I would need to ground pin #5. BUT – There are (4) different eight leg chips on the board…and none of them has the above numbers. Any guesses on: 24512wp, or 92121, or z127 or st1s10

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

JQ on July 12, 2012 at 6:34 am said:

Just wanted to let you know … completely bricked (past counters, 5215 pages somehow) 315w with all red lights lit finally locked itself out and wouldn’t print. I used a multimeter on “amps” to make the connection. I tried about five times and it did nothing. Then I saw someones post about removing the jumper after three blinks. I did that twice, then I noticed someone else said you could still print a stats page from the web interface — so I rebooted it again with pin shorted, printed a stats page from the web interface, printed a demo, and then rebooted. ZERO’s across the board! I was ready to actually buy chipped cartridges. How I got so many pages w/o the lockout in the first place is beyond me, but I have a before and after stats page to show for it! Amazingly simple great trick. Now I can love the Sammy again! PS — on a 315w, ALL network settings [I think just all settings, period are wiped] are reset to some ridiculous 192.0.0.192 settings, requiring some simple knowledge of networking to put yourself on that subnet and change it back — win!

robert on July 12, 2012 at 12:03 pm said:

hey Brian, i have the CLP-310 the board on mine looks different then on the video the p/n on the chip is clp-315w/xaa. the NIC firmware is V4.01.00(CLP-310W) 05-23-2008, need you help..

CJDavE on July 12, 2012 at 3:59 pm said:

Hacking the Samsung CLP-315 Laser Printer | Hello World!

http://rumburg.org/printerhack/

Hey. I have a CLP-310 w/ the following stats: OS: V1.00.11.53.x Oct 10-2009 Engine: 0.00.62.T(55) (which changed to (0) and stayed that way after my first unsuccessful reset) (USB Serial Number was blanked out on the first config report after the first power cycle (see step 5 above), but returned after turning the printer off then on again) Had an issue using the original instructions since holding the SDA pin to ground until the printer stops spinning just results in all LEDs being lit up red. What worked: holding SDA to ground (like a few people did above) until the third blink after turning the power on. It required two or three tries, but it finally worked. All values restored to 100% successfully. Thanks to all the detectives above and Brian: this just saved me the money to have the firmware flashed. Now I can buy the cheap refills and be done with it.

Kevin in Maine on July 14, 2012 at 9:13 pm said:

Brian..You’re the MAN.. I have 2 CLP-315s, bought second one used with no toner after drum expired on first, been buying new carts all along – prob 4 sets by now. Now 2nd (used) imaging drum expired , and could not get either printer to work again.. Had a hard time at first because apparent driver trouble would not indicate problem with drum. Found this wonderful post when searching for new imaging units, and not wanting to pay the $130++. The trick for me after several attempts was to tape off the 4 (fairly new) cartridges, and then open the SDA line after first 3 blinks like someone else pointed out. Tempted to pull the tape off to see what happens, but why ruin a good EUREKA. Could not get to reset with chips in carts “online”. Now I can get a fresh set of cartridges for 2nd used printer, and have two working units..THANKS VERY MUCH!

Kevin in Maine on July 14, 2012 at 9:21 pm said: