Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

aschmelyun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 259 posts

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#31

Post by slsii »

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 just tested this on OS X, which doesn't expose printers through /dev/ in the way you're describing as far as I can tell. But apparently lp exists on OS X, so you can do echo "Hello printer" | lp -d , and find the name through lpstat -p.

And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#34

Post by JKCalhoun »

The most interesting part of the article for me was the Gathering the Data section.

Because honestly, this would be a project better targeted for a large e-ink display. Maybe you've even seen the photo of the large wall-hanging e-ink display that in fact displays the day's news [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/11febnk/eink_newspape...

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#36

Post by ustad »

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…

Whats the printer you have? I’ve been thinking of getting one and did not know about the notification and external feature you mention.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#37

Post by mtoohig »

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…

Please share some of your code, I would like to see and get a feel for some personal ideas.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#38

Post by blenderob »

slsii wrote: post #31
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 just tested this on OS X, which doesn't expose printers through /dev/ in the way you're describing as far as I can tell. But apparently lp exists on OS X, so you can do echo "Hello printer" | lp -d , and find the name through lpstat -p. And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.

Wow! What a delightful exchange this is! Curiosity asked and answered in 12 minutes! I literally got goosebumps on my arms as I read your comment and reached the last part where you say "this works!"

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#39

Post by hansonkd »

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 to do that. Also since I am using OCR I don't have a way verify that the final content of the email after OCR.

So still a work in progress and not something I am using day to day.

More modern (90s) electronic typewriters with a screen (I guess you would call them word processors) could be a better way... But I like the click clack of each key stroke.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#40

Post by jahewson »

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 guess your printer driver is free to emulate an LPT if it wants to.
Post reply on HN