Link Spam Your Friends With Printed QR Codes

October 10, 2011 by Mike Nathan 39 Comments

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 would be the ideal medium for sharing things with others. He sat down and put together a bit of code that allows him to interface the printer with his computer, generating QR codes from his web browser with the simple click of a button. Now, when he wants to pass something along to a friend, he can quickly print out a label bearing both a QR code and URL for easy access later on.

All in all it’s an interesting idea, though we would be curious to see what would happen if we handed our non-techie friends a printed QR code.

Your Snapshot On A Thermal Printed Receipt, Instantly!

July 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

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 just like he did with his PING project. From there an ATmega8 microcontroller grabs each column from the image and prints it using the thermal printer. It looks like everything runs on a 9V battery which is nice for portability (although we still never got our hands on that rechargeable 9V we’ve been meaning to pick up). Perhaps just as impressive is that [Niklas] got this up and running with about 400 lines of code. Nice!

Of course you’ll want to see this in action so we’ve placed a video clip after the break. Just like old-timey cameras it looks like you’re going to need to sit still until the image is done printing.

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Arduino Based Thermal Printer

August 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

[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 your own is a definite win. [Manuel’s] version can print 96 points and has a font set that prints 32 characters per line. Check out the video after the break and let us know if the noise of the print head is a deal killer for you.

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