Adam Meyer of Bildr created a tutorial on connecting thermal printers to Arduinos:
Outputting data can be extremely useful, and typically when we look at doing this, it is either to the Arduino’s serial terminal, or to some sort of display. But what about making physical copies of the data? So a few months back, SparkFun started selling a thermal printer that you could connect to a microcontroller. That same day my brain filled with crazy thing you could do with it, like a giant fortune cookie that could print your fortune on the fly.
[Via Arduino]
6 thoughts on “Controlling a Thermal Printer with an Arduino”
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I love the idea of a cold-reading fortune cookie — asks you a couple questions, maybe listens to a info feed from an audience plant and prints “someone close to you passed recently. i’m getting john…edward? something like that. he still loves you…” all scrolling out of the cookie.
I love the idea of this thermal printer for many uses, but just one caution: BPA. It’s in thermal paper, and can be a significant source of contamination. If you handle this stuff a lot, vinyl gloves would be a good idea. (Grocery checkers take note…). Anyway, if it’s just occasionally touched, well, there are lots of things that are less than great for us…
I love the idea of this thermal printer for many uses, but just one caution: BPA. It’s in thermal paper, and can be a significant source of contamination. If you handle this stuff a lot, vinyl gloves would be a good idea. (Grocery checkers take note…). Anyway, if it’s just occasionally touched, well, there are lots of things that are less than great for us…