If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly into our phones, selected by algorithms perfectly tuned to rile us up on whatever the hot-button issue du jour happens to be. Welcome to the future.
If like us you long for a simpler way to get your news, [Andrew Schmelyun] has a partial solution with this dot-matrix news feeder. It’s part of his effort to detox a bit from the whole algorithm thing and make the news a little more concrete. He managed to chase down a very old Star Micronics printer with a serial interface, which he got on the cheap thanks to the previous owner not being sure if it worked. It did, at least after some cleaning, and thanks to a USB-to-serial and the efforts of Linux kernel hackers through the ages, was able to echo output to the printer from a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
From there, getting a daily news feed was as simple as writing some PHP code to mine the APIs of a few selected services. We’re perplexed and alarmed to report that Hackaday is not among the selected sources, but we’re sure this was just a small oversight that will be corrected in version 2. The program runs as a cron job so that a dead-tree version of the day’s top stories is ready for [Andrew]’s morning coffee.
We’ve seen similar news printers before; we particularly like this roll-feed paper version. But for a seriously retro feel, we’d love to see this done on a real teletype.
This idea reminds me a bit of my dad.
He once had hacked an electric typewriter on thermal printer basis into a serial printer.
The keyboard was removed, the electronic PCB was visible.
You could attach it to a COM port (DOS) or AUX port (CP/M) and have it work like a printer.
On DOS, it was possible to pipe output to COM port or to COPY files to it.
(If it still had a keyboard, COPY CON and CTTY might have been useful, too.)
He used this thing as a simple printer for listings and other niche application, I believe.
He also had an HP LaserJet Plus at the time, I think, for business use.
Must have been in mid-80s or so.
For some time at one job I had about 30 years ago I spent around half an hour every afternoon printing out a load of data from a Reuters terminal to pick through for the data I needed to enter into our database.
In one respect I’m glad I no longer have to spend lengthy amounts of time listening to the noise of a dot-matrix printer.
In another respect, no dot-matrix printer I ever owned nagged me to connect it to the internet. No dot matrix printer I ever owned regularly spammed me. No dot-matrix printer I ever owned would dry up if you hadn’t used it for a while, or charge you if you print more than so many pages a month, ribbons would slowly fade rather than suddenly give up and weren’t as expensive as ink-jet ink.
Swings and roundabouts. Swings and roundabouts.
But they should totally make this work on an old teletype!
I have something similar but with dot-matrix point of sales printer. Every morning a fresh a quote from https://zenquotes.io