Planet Arduino

A new guide today in the Adafruit Learning System: BLE Cat Thermal Printer with MEMENTO

Picture it: Toys “R” Us, 1998. Sonic has yet to run on a Nintendo system and there is only one PlayStation. Your eye catches the new Game Boy Printer behind a security cage and you think about how cool it would be to print out your Pokémon stats to show off to your friends at recess.

Almost 30 years later and everything old is new again. You can use the MEMENTO camera board with one of the internet famous BLE cat thermal printers to instantly print photos with the classic “gameboy” grayscale filter.

This guide will show you how to use the MEMENTO camera board with a BLE cat thermal printer to print photos with a “gameboy” grayscale filter.

Read more at BLE Cat Thermal Printer with MEMENTO

You would probably recognize a thermal printer as the thing that spits out receipts at a cash register. They offer a two key advantages: they do not require ink cartridges and they are compact. But because they print by applying heat to special paper that darkens when hot, they have low resolution and fidelity. If that’s a price you’re willing to pay for your next project, then Vaclav Krejci (AKA Upir on YouTube) has a great video tutorial that will show you how to control a thermal printer with your Arduino.

This model, a QR204, and most others like it, receive print content through an RS232 serial communications port. It has an internal microcontroller that lets it interpret what it receives over serial. If that is simple text, then it will print the text and move to the next line. But it also accepts commands in the form of special characters to modify the output, such as increasing the text size. It can also print low-resolution images sent in the form of bitmap arrays. Krejci explains how to do all of that in the video.

To follow along, you can use an Arduino Uno like Krejci or any other Arduino board. You only need to connect five jumper wires from the printer to the Arduino: ground, RX, TX, DTR, and NC. From there, all you need is a simple Sketch that sends serial output at 9600 baud through the pins you define. To print a line of text, use the standard Serial.println(“your text”) function. When you want to do something more complex, like print an image, Krejci has instructions on how to do so.

The post Control a thermal printer with your Arduino appeared first on Arduino Blog.

[Larry Bank]’s Arduino library to print text and graphics on BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) thermal printers has some excellent features, and makes sending wireless print jobs to a number of common models about as easy as can be. These printers are small, inexpensive, and wireless. That’s a great mix that makes them attractive for projects that would benefit from printing out a hardcopy.

It’s not limited to simple default text, either. Fancier output can be done using Adafruit_GFX library-style fonts and options, which sends the formatted text as graphics. You can read all about what the library can do in this succinct list of concise functions.

But [Larry] hasn’t stopped there. While experimenting with microcontrollers and BLE thermal printers, he also wanted to explore talking to these printers from his Mac using BLE directly. Print2BLE is a MacOS application that allows dragging image files into the application’s window, and if the preview looks good, the print button makes it come out of the printer as a 1-bpp dithered image.

Small thermal printers make for neat projects, like this retrofitted Polaroid camera, and now that these little printers are both wireless and economical, things can only get easier with the help of a library like this. Of course, if that’s all starting to look a little too easy, one can always put the thermal back in thermal printing by using plasma, instead.

[Andrew MacPherson] found out that compliments, even insincere ones, make the recipients feel better. So, he put together a thermal printer and a hilariously large button with an Arduino and created a machine that prints compliments. And where best to put a machine that prints out compliments? The local bar, where else?

An Arduino Nano clone runs the show connected to a thermal printer. The Nano clone didn’t like the 9 volt power supply, so a buck converter was used to reduce the voltage down to 5 volts for the Nano, while the printer gets the full power. During initial trials, the printer was very slow to print and it took [Andrew] a while to adjust the parameters – after tweaking the speed as well as the heating time, he was able to get the printer working without burning the paper or taking forever to print.

Once the machine was working, it was time to add a button. A large, light-up button was connected and glued to the side of the printer. More glue was used (after some “modifications” to the printer chassis) to secure a barrel connector for the power adapter.

[Andrew] decided that since he’s down at his favorite bar quite a lot, he’d set it up there. The customers could push the button and receive a compliment while drowning their sorrows. He got a friend of his who’s a copywriter to come up with some nicely written compliments to print out. The printer was such a hit that the bartender sent [Andrew] a message on Facebook saying so. If you have a thermal printer lying around, you can use this tutorial to connect it to the internet, or, if you don’t have one, you can build your own.

Once you have a track and a kart to race on it, what’s missing? A lap counter that can give your lap times in hardcopy, obviously! That’s what led [the_anykey] to create the Arduino-based Lap Timer to help him and his kids trim those precious seconds off their runs, complete with thermal printer for the results.

The hardware uses an infrared break-beam sensor module (a Velleman PEM10D) to detect when a kart passes by. This module is similar to a scaled-up IR reflective object sensor; it combines an IR emitter and receiver on one end, and is pointed at a reflector placed across the track, up to 10 meters away. When a kart breaks the beam, the module reports the event to the rest of the hardware. Only needing electronics on one side allows the unit to be self-contained.

An obvious shortcoming of this system is the inability to differentiate between multiple karts, but for timing a single driver’s performance it does the trick. What’s great about this project is it showcases how accessible hardware is today; a device like this is possible to put together with what are essentially off-the-shelf components available to any hobbyist, using an Arduino as the glue to hold it together. We’d only comment that a red-tinted piece of plastic as an overlay for the red display (and a grey-tinted one for the green) would make the LED displays much easier to read. Still, this is a very clean and well-documented build. See it in action in the video embedded below.

If race timing that can handle multiple vehicles is more your speed, we’ve previously seen DIY lap counters intended for drone racing.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks

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