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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

#211

Post by bombcar »

AStonesThrow wrote: post #140
hansonkd wrote: post #21

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…

Whatever vendor(s) decided that the restaurant industry needed to switch over to thermal printers, I hope Cory Doctorow has a chat with them. "Let's just tape this thermal receipt to your to-go container, and ... refund? What do you mean refund?"

Thermal printers are cheaper because you only have to buy paper, no ribbon or ink.

However, thermal receipt printers at restaurants seem to be among the cheapest ones around - you can get thermal printers that result in receipts that withstand decent temperatures (but, obviously, not all).

Many shipping labels are printed by direct thermal printers and those labels stand up quite well. Check Zebra for examples.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#212

Post by nik282000 »

hansonkd wrote: post #21

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…

Great minds. My thermal printer spits out the weather every morning and if any important devices fall off my network it prints a notification.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#213

Post by tomjen3 »

hansonkd wrote: post #39
rbanffy wrote: post #12

I've been thinking about getting myself an electronic typewriter and MITM the keyboard to turn it into a into a serial terminal. I can't afford a proper ASR-33, so I'll have to make it work with what I got.

My current project right now with my thermal printer is responding to emails via typewriter. Email comes in -> prints to receipt printer -> I type up the response via electronic typewriter -> hit scan on my scanner -> sent a response -> confirmation printed on receipt printer. PoC worked well. Right now I am building out how to correlate what I scan to who it is supposed to respond to. So I working on some GPT magic…

That is delightfully archaic.

May I ask what you are using to interface with your email client and what scanner do you use?

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#215

Post by tomjen3 »

awad wrote: post #133
joeyparsons wrote: post #18

til you can still easily buy continuously feedable paper for dot matrix printers on amazon - was wondering if that was a scarce resource for a project like this! kudos!

I've seen dot matrix still used at car dealerships so doesn't totally surprise me there'd still be plenty of industry uses

I could see piping all syslog critial and above out to a .matrix printer that sits in a locked room as a cheap way to enforce a WORM log of events. With a continious sheet of paper you would only need to access it rarely, and essentially only to change the ribbon and replace the paper source.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#217

Post by noja »

kragen wrote: post #170
autoexec wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Receipt printers are fun but take care not to buy toxic paper https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/03/the-health-...

Assuming BPA is what you're worried about (it's not "toxic" by the usual definitions but still something you may want to avoid) there isn't another mainstream option.

> it's not "toxic" by the usual definitions

iirc if you have wet hands you absorb way more and it is toxic

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#218

Post by 1oooqooq »

FredPret wrote: post #22
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.

post beep is a premium feature today!

most boards won't have any. if you pay premium, you get post beep. if you pay even more you get post stage led indicators.

so this item on your list is not about the past but enshitification.

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