The internals of a printer, whatever technology it may use, are invariably proprietary, with an abstracted more standard language being used to communicate with a host computer. Thus it’s surprisingly rare to see hacks on printers as printers, rather than printer hacks using the parts for some other purpose. This makes [Oelison]’s brain-swap of a Casio thermal label printer a welcome surprise, as it puts an ESP32 in the machine instead of whatever Casio gave it.
The value in the hack lies in the insight it gives into how a thermal printer works as much as it does in the ESP32 and the Casio, as it goes into some detail on the various signals involved. The strobe line for instance to enable the heater is a nuance we were unaware of. The resulting printer will lose its keyboard and display, but make up for it in connectivity.
Despite what we said earlier this isn’t the first label printer hack we’ve seen. A previous one was Linux-based though.
I got an old Casio label printer from the 90s that has an actual (SMD) Z80 CPU in it.
I used to work for a company who made label printers. In the 90s we were using 6502s with custom firmware
Yup. Those and 8051s will never die.
Just for clarity, when the link at the end says that the previous hack was Linux-based, they mean that the PRINTER started out as a Linux device, which made hacking it relatively straightforward.
Ok, now, see… I thought this was my fault, but it’s not.
I didn’t post this as a reply to Senile Data’s comment. I had the reply field to their comment OPEN (accidental tap while scrolling on mobile, a common issue here), but I hit “Cancel reply” on that. Then I used the form at the bottom of the comments to post. But my comment still ended up as a reply here.
It’s happened a bunch of times recently, but I assumed I was doing something wrong.
Note that you can buy thermal printer with bluetooth today that are completely reversed engineered (source code for printing with them: https://github.com/NaitLee/Cat-Printer search cat printer for the reveng code) for less than $20. With a battery so they are standalone. And they can print thermal stickers too.
Cool! I guess the approach and code – with minor modifications – could be applied to pretty much any brand of label or cash register printer. I’ll keep an eye on the project. Maybe I’ll even try to “Frankestein” another printer.
I would really love to replace the brains of my Brother QL800w. The wifi gui is slow, unstable, and it often needs a kick in the ass when it just stops answering over IP.