Driving And Old Receipt Printer

It seems like receipt printers are pretty popular as hacking targets lately. Aside from the wasted paper, they cooler than plain old blinking LEDs and we’d image there’s a ton of them floating around out there as advances in technology have prompted retailers to trade in the bulky dinosaurs for slimmer thermal printers. [Philip Hayton] picked up this Epson model at some type of equipment sale and set to work figuring out how to control it.

This unit is addressed via a parallel interface. After assessing the pinout and searching a bit for protocol information [Philip] hooked up his Arduino and printed out a fitting first message that reads: “Hello World”. He’s got a few tricks you can learn from when trying to talk to hardware with which you are not well acquainted.

Need a reason to go out and find your own receipt printer? Check out this paper-based gaming system for some inspiration. Now develop your own paper recycling setup and we can file this one under ‘green hacks‘.

[Thanks Andy]

18 thoughts on “Driving And Old Receipt Printer

  1. Corrections:
    In the title, “driving an old”.
    “they cooler than plain old blinking LEDs and we’d image there’s a ton of them floating around out there”, *they’re, *imagine

    Great spellchecking.

  2. Corrections v2

    “and we’d image there’s a ton of them”
    There IS a ton of them?
    “and we’d imagine there are a ton of them”

    I’m surprised Noodle didn’t catch that one.
    Listen, HAD, if you’d like a volunteer assistant editor, I would love to help.

  3. they’re still in use in a many libraries and make me want to tinker when i encounter one that is printing highRes which takes about twice as long as the lowRes mode which is all you need for a receipt.

  4. So as not to totally burn Mike, I understand everyone has a different grasp of English. Lots of my friends happen to write the same as they speak. Plus English is complicated as hell for my friends from Denmark. Kinda like those family guy characters that almost pass for American…

    I do enjoy seeing people repurposing old tech, I love that this will undoubtably trigger a wave of receipt printer hacks.

  5. I used that exact model of receipt printer for years when I used to work as a circulation specialist at my school’s library. Working in a library is, oddly enough, very boring, so I discovered lots of interesting features.

    As one commenter mentioned, you can print in low and hi-res modes. The drivers that we used (for XP) also enable it to be used as a printer in any program that supports it, so you could print fairly decent images and text. It was also capable of printing in portrait or landscape mode, although I can’t remember the max character width. My favorite feature was its ability to auto-cut the paper when it was done printing. All in all, a great little printer. I might have to pick one up whenever they decide to upgrade their systems.

  6. I am trying to use one of the HC-05 Serial Bluetooth jobbies to connect to ,my Epson TM88iii receipt printer. At the moment I am using it connected to my PC via a null modem serial cable but i want to convert my whole till system to android. currently I am using VBA and chr$ to control the printer but the problem i’m having is deciding which of the 4 useable connections i should use. TX and RX obvious CTS and RTS i can tap off the board but what about DSR and DTR ??

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