Inkjet printer assembly with a central processing unit configured to determine a performance characteristic of a print cartridge

1. An inkjet printer assembly comprising:

a cartridge having an integrated pagewidth printhead integrated circuit (IC) and an authentication device;

a cradle configured to receive the cartridge and position the printhead IC adjacent a media feed path, the cradle receiving the cartridge in a manner to allow end-user insertion and removal of the cartridge;

a driven mechanism provided on the cradle, the driven mechanism configured to feed print media through the media feed path; and

a central processing unit (CPU) configured to control operation of the IC, to determine a performance characteristic of the cartridge, to control operation of the driven mechanism, and to drive the printhead IC in response to the determined performance characteristic of the cartridge; and

a printing fluid blotter provided on the cartridge, wherein

the cradle includes a connector for engaging with the authentication device upon receipt of the cartridge into the cradle, and

the printing fluid blotter is actuated by the driven mechanism provided on the cradle.

2. The printer assembly of claim 1 , wherein the driven mechanism includes:

an air compressor operatively providing compressed air directed to keep the printhead IC clear of debris; and

a motor with a transmission assembly which includes a direct drive coupling from a spindle of the motor to an impeller of the air compressor and a worm-gear and cog transmission to a media transport assembly configured to feed the print media to the driven mechanism.

3. The printer assembly of claim 2 , wherein the transmission assembly includes a flipper gear assembly for selective engagement with the drive shaft, the flipper gear assembly including:

a first gear fixed to the drive shaft;

a second gear radially spaced from the first gear; and

a locating member retaining the second gear and the first gear in a meshed configuration.

4. The printer assembly of claim 1 , wherein the CPU subsystem includes a general purpose input output peripheral, an interrupt controller unit, timer units and a serial communications block to interface the CPU to a host print system.

5. The printer assembly of claim 1 , wherein the authentication device connects to the CPU via the connector to facilitate communication of the performance characteristic to the CPU.

6. The printer assembly of claim 1 , wherein the CPU includes a dead nozzle compensator configured to compensate for dead nozzles in the printhead by color redundancy and error diffusing of dead nozzle data into surrounding dots.

7. The printer assembly of claim 1 , further comprising:

a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) subsystem configured to store print data and to arbitrate requests received from the CPU; and

a print engine pipeline (PEP) subsystem configured to accept compressed pages from the DRAM subsystem and to render said pages to bi-level dots for printing by the IC.

8. The printer assembly of claim 7 , wherein the PEP subsystem includes a contone decoder unit, a lossless bi-level decoder and a tag encoder, the contone decoder unit configured to expand a JPEG-compressed contone layer, the lossless bi-level decoder configured to expand a compressed bi-level layer, and the tag encoder configured to encode tags for later rendering.