Engineer reverse-engineers Canon printer firmware to kill ink counters and proprietary cartridges
ngxson · x · 2026-10-27
Frustrated by his Canon PIXMA MG2550S (a 2015 budget inkjet) treating him "like a slave instead of an owner," ngxson started reverse-engineering its firmware to own the cartridge and print head: no more ink counters, print head errors, or proprietary cartridges. Part one covers dumping the firmware himself after finding all existing dumps paywalled: mainboard part number QM7-4706, firmware in a Winbond W25Q16CVSIG SPI flash plus a 24C08 config EEPROM, read with a DIY 3D-printed PCB probe (I2C needed 2 wires, SPI needed 4). Next steps: analyze, write his own firmware, and flash it. Code and notes are live on GitHub (canon-mg2550s-firmware) for others to follow.
More from Infra
- DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 hits original's max-effort score at default effort: $0.15 per correct task — ryanshrout · 2026-10-27
- GPT-6.1 Terra Is the Cheapest Frontier Model at $0.67 per Successful Task — bindureddy · 2026-10-27
- Volta releases Blackwell kernel verifier letting LLMs generate PTX directly, skipping compiler layers — Azaliamirh · 2026-10-27
- Taiwanese families at TSMC's Arizona plant are shocked US high school is 'so much easier' — Polymarket · 2026-10-27
- OpenRouter hits 1 trillion tokens per day — ycombinator · 2026-10-27
- AI Cloud Operators Sell Years of Compute Yet Struggle to Finance Delivery — AccBalanced · 2026-10-27