Typewriting machines – Sheet or web – For feeding sheet from stack or pack holder
Reexamination Certificate
2001-03-28
2003-10-21
Nguyen, Lamson (Department: 2861)
Typewriting machines
Sheet or web
For feeding sheet from stack or pack holder
C347S104000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06634818
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates generally to methods and devices for detecting the amount of recordable medium remaining in a paper cassette or paper tray that stores a plurality of recordable media (e.g., printing paper, and OHP films). The present invention is suitable, for example, for detecting the amount of remaining sheets of paper in an image-forming device such as a printer, a photocopier, and a facsimile unit.
In recent years, equipment for office automation (or automated clerical works), such as a printer and a photocopier, has been widely used in order to make the office operations more efficient, and in many instances a local area network (LAN) environment is established in the office, where more than one personal computer (PC) shares one printer.
The printer typically includes a printing part, a sheet conveyor mechanism, and a sheet feeder. The printing part prints specified information on a sheet of paper that is timely conveyed from the sheet feeder by the sheet conveyor mechanism. The sheet conveyor mechanism includes a plurality of conveyor rollers such as a pick roller and a register roller, (and other conveyor means, e.g., a conveyor belt, etc.), and conveys a sheet of paper through the printing part, from the sheet feeder to an ejection part. The sheet feeder is comprised of a paper tray and/or a paper cassette that feeds a sheet of paper to the sheet conveyor mechanism. The sheet feeder may take on a manual feeding structure that requires a user to place sheets of paper manually on one-by-one basis, or an automatic feeding structure that enables multiple sheets of paper to be fed automatically on one-by-one basis to the sheet conveyor mechanism, and thus only requires a user to place the sheets on a single occasion.
For instance, the paper cassette is configured to be attachable to and detachable from a printer body, and to accommodate approximately 100-500 sheets of paper, so as to facilitate operations of adding and replacing sheets of paper. When sheets of paper are placed in the paper cassette, a paper placement part on which the sheets of paper are placed pivots about an axis provided at one end of the paper placement part, and thereby the topmost sheet is positioned so that the pick roller as part of the sheet conveyor mechanism may be brought into contact with an end of the sheet opposite the pivoted end so as to dispense the sheet.
The paper placement part may pivot in accordance with a remaining amount of sheets on the paper placement part and always be properly positioned so that the pick roller may dispense the topmost sheet. In order to enable a large amount of paper to be placed for use with a high-speed machine or other performance machines handling a large amount of paper, the paper tray that is configured to have the paper placement part movable vertically may be provided so as to bring the topmost sheet of paper into contact with the sheet conveyor mechanism.
The sheet feeder or printer body is generally equipped with an empty sensor that detects a loss of paper. The printer has a controller that receives information from the empty sensor, and indicates on an operation panel of the printer or a display of a PC (via an operation of a printer driver) that paper has run out. Consequently, a user may know that paper has run out during printing.
However, a user of an image-forming device using a conventional automatic sheet feeder mechanism could not easily and effectively determine whether his/her print command would be complete without suspension due to a loss of paper, when he/she provides the print command.
Since the empty sensor can detect a loss of paper, if paper has run out before printing is initiated, a user may fill paper and then execute a print command. However, if paper remains but the remaining amount is not so much as the number of sheets to be printed, a user does not receive a notification of a loss of paper until the last remaining sheet has been printed. Therefore, a user, for example, who wishes to print a large number of sheets over a lunch break may get aware of a loss of paper after the lunch break, and inefficiently has no other choice but to retry that printing which is suspended halfway from a page that could not be printed.
In order to solve the above problems, several methods for indicating the remaining amount of paper other than the empty sensor have been proposed. For example, one of the methods provides a transparent window in a cassette for visual inspection. However, this method requires a user to stand near a printer, and thus is disadvantageously inconvenient. Particularly, in a LAN environment, where a printer is shared among more than one user, the users usually cannot have the printer near their seats. Moreover, only the visual inspection of a batch of paper disadvantageously cannot provide the accurate number of the paper.
Accordingly, another method has been proposed for detecting the remaining amount of paper using a lever brought into contact with a top surface of paper, so that a transmission-type sensor detects a varied thickness of the butch of paper or an encoder detects an angular variation of the lever. Yet another method has been proposed using a reflection-type sensor or the like to directly detect the remaining amount of paper. These methods would increase complexity of the structure for detecting the remaining amount of paper due to requirement for provision of the lever, or the like, and thus the size and cost of the device would increase. In addition, variation in contact positions of the lever with paper would decrease the reliability of the detection of the remaining amount of paper. Further, these methods would rely only on an actual amount of paper remaining, and thus be unsuitable for use in a LAN environment in particular. To be more specific, supposing that print commands from more than one user who works in a LAN environment are pending in a queue, for example, when three users see a message displayed on their PCs that a current remaining amount of paper in the printer is 70 sheets, and each user gives a print command to print 30 sheets respectively to the printer, each user believes that his/her own print command would successfully be executed, but the last print command would fail to complete due to a loss of paper.
BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Therefore, it is an exemplified general object of the present invention to provide a novel and useful feeder, image-forming device, and remaining amount detecting method in which the above conventional disadvantages are eliminated.
Another exemplified and more specific object of the present invention is to provide a feeder, image-forming device, and remaining amount detecting method that allows a user to easily and effectively determine whether his/her print command would be complete without suspension due to a loss of paper, when he/she provides the print command.
In order to achieve the above objects, a feeder as one exemplified embodiment of the present invention is a feeder that feeds a recordable medium to a processor part that performs a process, and comprises: a sheet placement part that can accommodate a plurality of the recordable media in a stack of layered sheets, and rotate and shift to a suitable position for feeding the recordable media to the processor part; and a shift amount indicator part that is configured to rotate in a direction of rotation of the sheet placement part as the sheet placement part rotates, so as to enable a shift amount of the sheet placement part corresponding to a remaining amount of the recordable media to be electrically transmitted to an external device. The feeder includes a shift amount indicator part that is configured to rotate in a direction of rotation of the sheet placement part as the sheet placement part rotates, and thus may directly detect the shift amount of the sheet placement part without the need for an additional means such as a lever. The shift amount indicator part electrically transmits the shift amount, and thus serves to have errors reduced compared
Ikeyama Takuzou
Ishiyama Yoshiya
Kajitani Osamu
Murata Akinori
Sato Kazuyasu
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