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Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

aschmelyun.com

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Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#21

Post by hansonkd »

I did something similar with a receipt printer.

a thermal usb receipt printer is like $75 dollars and easily controlled by python. Super easy to print out images and QR codes. and the autocut functionality makes it easy to segment messages. Additionally the receipt printer is nice because you can activate the bell inside as an additional "notification" and has an extra control for a cash drawer that I am thinking of hooking into to control a light or something.

I had it set up for emails and every morning it would print off my calendar.

I think the interface works well especially if you pair it with a physical control like buttons or NFC reader. That way you can issue "commands" and get output. Like I had one NFC card to make it print my calendar, one for unread emails, etc.

I have some more features I want to add to it. Its very fun way to cut down on screen time, but ironically i have spent more screen time coding with it and setting it up then it probably has saved me. lol.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#22

Post by FredPret »

freetanga wrote: post #11

Cool project. I missed that sound. Hearing it again makes me realize how patient my folks were with my midnight debugging sessions… On the other hand, when the author wanted to push Unicode on this, I felt old and immediately pictured Epsons old wire bound manuals outlining supported characters (a subset of ASCII if I recall)

I miss the soundscape of old computers:

- the POST beep

- the sound a floppy drive makes after inserting

- the infernal scream of a dot matrix printer

- even I don't miss dial-up sounds though.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#23

Post by hggigg »

I had something similar to this at home except it was a laser printer and it got a postscript file out of LaTeX which was parsed out from a bunch of Perl.

A couple of months in, my naive Perl parser broke and I woke up to half a ream of paper with "a" printed continually down the left hand side of the page.

Now I don't bother!

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#24

Post by acomjean »

In the early 90s my daily college paper had a dot matrix printer for the AP news feed. My last year I think they discontinued the service.

Editors would take the stories and type them into our system again. The agony was mitigated by the fact we didn’t run a ton of AP stories and better ways were entirely obvious back then.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#25

Post by Krasnol »

I miss the sound of those things. It was quite satisfying, and I'm not sure if it was because those were the first printers I've ever seen or because it really is a fascinating machine. That sound...as if someone would rip paper apart but nobody does and there are letters on it afterward...ASCII art was so awesome on them...

...my SO would kill me.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#26

Post by bityard »

Neat. Reminds me of when I (briefly) worked at a radio station. I forget basically all of the details now, but I'm pretty sure it would automatically dial up some Associated Press number, fetch the latest headlines, and send them to a dot-matrix printer. This was in the late 90's and it ran MS-DOS.

In case the author is reading: on most printers of the day, you could set the font via control codes and many printers even had variable-width fonts.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#27

Post by Lonestar1440 »

Legitimately great product idea, I think? Just the idea of a personalized (truly! by you! Not by MSN or whomever), off-screen news feed every morning is cool. The idea that I could *also replace my alarm clock with a dot matrix printer* is even cooler.

I could easily customize the php to hit my own news sources, but wouldn't know where to begin doing the hardware side on my own. Probably many others in this spot.

I'd buy it, for way more than the cost of an old printer, if it was available on the market!

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#29

Post by whartung »

So, curiosity today.

One of the things that this person does is simply echo to /dev/lp0.

Which is all you did back in the day. Shove text down the interface, and the printer printed.

Now, while we have very fancy modern printers, they're still printers with a long legacy. Even back in the day, early HP laser printers worked like this. Shove data down the wire, and it printed (Courier 10, 66 lines per page). Only the Apple Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't think) because it was an exclusively PostScript printer. Instead, you shoved PostScript down the wire.

As the printers evolved, the language that was sent to them got more complicated. But even so, they still had a long line of backward compatibility.

So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?

If I do that with an EPSON and send it EPSON MX-80 escape codes -- does it still work? It wouldn't surprise me either way, but I'm just curious if someone knows. They're very black boxy today (to me anyway).

(Anyone else remember the joys of getting reports to fit on pre-printed, multi-copy NCR forms? What fun that was!)

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#30

Post by dasfsi »

whartung wrote: post #29

So, curiosity today. One of the things that this person does is simply echo to /dev/lp0. Which is all you did back in the day. Shove text down the interface, and the printer printed. Now, while we have very fancy modern printers, they're still printers with a long legacy. Even back in the day, early HP laser printers worked like this. Shove data down the wire, and it printed (Courier 10, 66 lines per page). Only the…

I have an Epson LX-350, bought new a few years ago. It connects via USB (but there's also serial and parallel ports). When connected via usb it appeared as /dev/usblp0 or something like that, and yes just cat'ing to it worked. And presumably the customers who buy these things new want them compatible with whatever processes they already have (for the last 30-50 years), so it supports both ESC/P 2 as you'd expect and IBM's escape codes (which I didn't expect and the old matrix printers I had from the 90's didn't).

What's perhaps more surprising, my macbook had an inbuilt driver for generic epson printers and it worked. It was not very good, it printed as graphics but it was there for some reason.

Not sure about modern inkjet and laser printers though. An inkjet Epson I used to have once did support raw ESC/P codes though, but it was 20 years ago.

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