A visually satisfying tape ticker

visually-stunning-tape-ticker

This visually stunning tape ticker prints out [Horatius Steam's] emails for him. It watches his email address for a secret trigger phrase in the subject line. Sure, thermal receipt printer projects are becoming rather common, but we can't remember seeing one that took this much time and effort to make it into a showpiece. The two parts that make this happen are the thermal printer with cutter … [Read more...]

Hacking a Brother thermal printer to use non-OEM continuous rolls

hacking-thermal-printer

You can get your hands on a Brother thermal label printer for $65-75. But if you don't want to buy the Brother branded continuous feed paper for it you're out of luck. Unless you pull off this hack which lets you use any thermal paper you want with a Brother QL-500 printer. The printer is tied to the OEM paper because of a pattern printed on the back of the roll. It's basically an encoder strip … [Read more...]

Printing anything with a thermal receipt printer

recipt

Over the last year, [James] has been a part of a few commercial projects that used a thermal receipt printer as part of the build. Something must have cracked in his mind, because [James] spent a lot of time developing a way to print customized content on receipt printers, connecting these printers to the Internet, and sharing content with other Internet-connected receipt printers. Even [James] … [Read more...]

Twittertape machine keeps track of your social media stock.

ticker

During the gilded age, oil magnates, entrepreneurs, and robber barons would have a ticker tape machine in their study. This machine would print stock and commodity prices and chart these men's assets climbing higher and higher. A lot has changed in 100 years, as now [Adam] can be kept apprised of what @KimKardashian, @BarackObama and @stephenfry ate for breakfast with his Twittertape … [Read more...]

Link spam your friends with printed QR codes

qr_printer_sharing_links

While [Oryx] is down with social media like Facebook and Twitter, there are times when he wants to share things with people he is hanging out with in the real world. Sure, he could always email his friends links to the latest video of a cat doing something totally hilarious, but he wanted something a bit more tangible. He had a small thermal printer from SparkFun kicking around, and thought it … [Read more...]

Your snapshot on a thermal printed receipt, instantly!

instant-camera-uses-thermal-printer

What could be better than a low-res black and white photograph printed instantly on paper that will yellow and crumple over time? Wow, we really need to work on our sales pitch. But all kidding aside, we love the idea that [Niklas Roy] came up with in order to build this thermal printing camera. His Picasa album has two snapshots of the hardware. He's using an LM1881 for video sync separation … [Read more...]

Arduino based thermal printer

arduino-based-thermal-printer

[Manuel] built his own thermal printer based around an Arduino. We're a bit confused about the parts, his webpage specifies an EFA-1019HW2 print head but the bill of materials on his github shows EPT-1019W2. We can't find a source for either product number, but we did find similar thermal line printers for as low as $32.00. The controller boards on the other hand look to be around $150 so building … [Read more...]