chips

Not that important but its been bugging me for a while.
I am a printer engineer and i also remanufacture cartridges a couple of years back hp brought out the "smart cartridge" this aparently made it better but what it really did was try to stop people from recycling it didnt.

This is all very boring but the way they made these cartridges smart was they put a chip on the cartridge to tell the printer that it is a hp cartridge and how much toner was left in the cartridge now that sounds easy but the chip is encapsulated inside a plastic enclosure it cant touch anything at all no wires or contacts how the hell is it powered and how does it work?

 

Does it work the same way a RFID tag works?

 

No that wpouldnt work as it has continully updated info.

 

It gets it's power through the plastic.

My Braun electric toothbrush, and a few other of my appliances work on the same principle. (Not sure, but I think it uses some kind of radio waves)

It doesn't need a metal to metal contact.

 

Thats cool.

It is very impressive and annoying clone chips cost £15 each

 

You can even get pads, kinda like a mouse pad that you plug in to a powerpoint, then you rest your video or photo camera etc on it and they will recharge, just by resting on the pad.