A small, white thermal printer with a cartoon cat face above the paper outlet. It is sitting on a black mat on top of a pale wooden table. A Raspberry Pi sits nearby.

Bluetooth Printer Works With AppleTalk

July 22, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 1 Comment

For retrocomputing enthusiasts, getting old computers to work with newer peripherals can be an exciting challenge or horrible headache. If you need to print out receipts from an old Mac, you might just be in luck now that [Hamin Mousavi] has gotten AppleTalk to work with cat printers.

[Mousavi] uses a Raspberry Pi 4 here in his version of the hack, but any Bluetooth capable computer running Linux should work. His command line screenshots are from a Debian-based system, but you should be able to translate to other systems as needed.

Thanks to previous work on these thermal printers, drivers are available for them on many other systems, so the tricky part comes down to getting the web connection to the printer working through the Linux box and then getting the Mac (in this case an iMac G3) to recognize the printer as something to install.

We’ve seen people do some really interesting things with thermal printers like making them D&D tools, breaking their paper DRM, and even black and white “Polaroids.”

Continue reading “Bluetooth Printer Works With AppleTalk” →

Mini Wireless Thermal Printers Get Arduino Library (and MacOS App)

September 21, 2021 by Donald Papp 23 Comments

[Larry Bank]’s Arduino library to print text and graphics on BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) thermal printers has some excellent features, and makes sending wireless print jobs to a number of common models about as easy as can be. These printers are small, inexpensive, and wireless. That’s a great mix that makes them attractive for projects that would benefit from printing out a hardcopy.

It’s not limited to simple default text, either. Fancier output can be done using Adafruit_GFX library-style fonts and options, which sends the formatted text as graphics. You can read all about what the library can do in this succinct list of concise functions.

But [Larry] hasn’t stopped there. While experimenting with microcontrollers and BLE thermal printers, he also wanted to explore talking to these printers from his Mac using BLE directly. Print2BLE is a MacOS application that allows dragging image files into the application’s window, and if the preview looks good, the print button makes it come out of the printer as a 1-bpp dithered image.

Small thermal printers make for neat projects, like this retrofitted Polaroid camera, and now that these little printers are both wireless and economical, things can only get easier with the help of a library like this. Of course, if that’s all starting to look a little too easy, one can always put the thermal back in thermal printing by using plasma, instead.