This week end a friend of mine gave me a printer that refuse to print. Strange world where Earth is dying slowly and printers are programmed to stop working after a while.

So I decided to change some bits in this printer’s EEPROM and let it print again.

Step 1: make WIC access to USB port

WIC seems to be quite old and relies on usblp module (that creates /dev/usb/lp0 node). This is not the default driver on Ubuntu 24 (the version I’m using), so we’ll have to force this module to be used:

Disable ipp-usb service and load usblp module

sudo systemctl stop ipp-usb
sudo systemctl mask ipp-usb
sudo modprobe usblp

Then unplug and plug the printer again => ls /dev/usb/lp* should give a result (typically /dev/usb/lp0, created by usblp).

Give access to printer for user

It’s non safe to run this program as root (especially as this is not an open-source software), so we’ll want to use it as normal user. To do so we’ll add a udev rule that gives us the permission to access to this port:

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/99-epson-usblp.rules

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="04b8", ATTR{idProduct}=="118b", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 1 > /sys/\$devpath/authorized; modprobe usblp', MODE="0666", GROUP="lp"

=> note that you’ll have to be part of lp group (sudo usermod -a -G lp $(whoami))

Save the file, and reload udev:

udevadm control --reload-rules

Unplug and plug the printer again and you should be able to read from the device as regular user: cat /dev/usb/lp0 should return something (probably random characters).

Step 2: Use WIC to reset counters

  • download WIC for Linux from https://www.wic.support/download
  • install it (or expand it direclty as archive if - like me - you’ve dependencies problems)

  • start it

      ~/Downloads/wicreset/usr/bin/wicreset
  • some images are not loaded but this doesn’t prevent the global process to be acheived

  • errors in logs can be ignored

  • you can test to set waste couners to 80% using “trial” serial code, then read waste counters again

  • if this test works you can go ahead and buy a one-time license for your printer

Step 3: re-enable ipp-usb service

To make the print system working again we do not want continue using usblp.

rmmod usblp
sudo systemctl unmask ipp-usb