Raspberry Pi controlled Thermal Printer
[Issue 45] We show you how to connect a Raspberry Pi to a thermal printer and schedule it to print useful data on a routine basis, including 7-day weather reports.
This project started as an experiment to operate a cheap thermal receipt printer from a Raspberry Pi, and to get them working with a few basic scripts to print out useful information like weather, news, etc, on a recurring basis.
The outcome is a fully-functioning Raspberry Pi controlled printer that can be set up to print a weather forecast, the news headlines, or hashtags that trend on Twitter, thanks to freely available APIs. There is plenty of scope to have it print other things as well.
Our build uses a HOIN HOP-H58 Thermal Printer and Raspberry Pi 4, however, you could adapt the project to suit a different printer or RPi board.
We show you how to set up the APIs, and how to code the Pi using various Python scripts.
Read all about it on page 73 of Issue 45, or visit https://diyode.io/045rytg