[Larry Bank] The Arduino library for printing text and graphics on a BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) thermal printer has some excellent features and can send wireless print jobs to many common models as easily as possible. These printers are small, inexpensive, and wireless. This is a good combination that makes them attractive for projects that can benefit from printing hard copies.
It is also not limited to simple default text. You can use Adafruit_GFX library style fonts and options to complete more advanced output, and send formatted text as graphics. You can read all the information about what the library can do in this concise list of functions.
But [Larry] didn’t stop there. While experimenting with microcontrollers and BLE thermal printers, he also wanted to explore directly using BLE to talk to these printers from his Mac. Print2BLE is a MacOS application that allows you to drag image files to the application window. If the preview effect is good, the print button will make it come out of the printer as a 1-bpp dithered image.
Small thermal printers are suitable for neat projects, such as modified Polaroid cameras. Now these small printers are wireless and economical. Only with the help of such a library can things become easier. Of course, if all this seems a bit too easy, you can use plasma to put thermal printing back into thermal printing at any time.
I’m browsing the repository, wondering if anyone knows about these cheap printers, that is, Phomemo M02, M02s, and M02pro are not listed as compatible, but looking for cat, pig and other printers, they may be more or less the same underlying mechanism? Want to know if it applies to the library. Another repository on github for phomemo python scripts for printing on linux. These things are cheap and cool to play. Want to know why it didn’t get more traction.
There are many variations of these BLE printers. Internally, they may all have the same printhead and UART interface, but companies that add BLE boards like to change things to make it difficult to use outside of their applications. The two printers I support must be reverse engineered through their Android applications because they do not support the ESC/POS standard command set. GOOJPRT behaves correctly and only sends standard commands via BLE. I suspect that many “strange” people decide to use communication protocols to force you to use their mobile apps.
Therefore, if I buy one of them and empty it out and unplug the BLE part, then it is very likely that you only have a UART thermal printer?
I have been playing with Amazon’s 80mm NETUM wireless/rechargeable printer. It costs $80 and is displayed on the serial com port. It supports ESC/POS, so I wrote my own PowerShell library for images. The only disadvantage of NETUM is that it does not have the capacity for very large printer rolls, but this is the price of compactness. I found that I can take some medium-sized rolls and unroll half of them onto an empty spool. It takes less than five minutes, which is not a big inconvenience according to the speed at which I use them.
The short answer-yes! Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is very consistent on different platforms, so implementing it on Linux will not make much difference.
For scalable text, simple lines, and barcodes, no complicated drivers are required, because almost all common label/receipt printers support the relatively simple Epson printer standard code, also known as ESC/P. [1] To be more precise, label/receipt thermal printers use the ESC/POS (Epson Standard Code/Point of Sale) variant. [2] The name ESC/P or ESC/POS is also suitable because there is an ESCape character (ASCII code 27) before the printer command.
Simple general-purpose thermal label/receipt printers can be purchased cheaply on websites such as AliExpress. [3] These general-purpose printers have an RS-232 UART TTL level interface that supports ESC/POS. The RS-232 UART TTL level interface can be easily converted to USB using a UART/USB bridge chip (such as CH340x) or a cable. For WiFi and BLE wireless connections, you only need to connect a module such as the Espressif ESP32 module to the UART TTL interface. [4] Or add 10-15 US dollars to the price of general thermal label/receipt printers, and it will directly provide USB/WiFi/BLE. But where is the fun in this?
When you want to process the image (zoom/dither/black-and-white conversion) and send it to the label printer, a complex driver comes into play. For Windows, the driver is provided online, search for “Windows thermal label printer driver” without “s”. It is more challenging for microcontrollers that use universal label/receipt printers to print photos, and that is [Larry Bank]‘s Arduino library seems to be taken to the next level.
3. Goojprt Qr203 58 mm micro micro embedded thermal printer Rs232+Ttl panel compatible with Eml203, used for receipt barcode US $15.17 + US $2.67 Shipping:
4. Wireless module NodeMcu V3 V2 Lua WIFI development board ESP8266 ESP32 with PCB antenna and USB port ESP-12E CP2102 USD 2.94 + USD 0.82 Shipping fee:
The paper used by these printers is related to a large number of health problems. In addition, it is not recyclable or environmentally friendly in any respect.
It contains a potent endocrine disruptor bisphenol-a. By the way, products that do not contain BPA usually contain BPA-technically different, but worse endocrine disruptors.
Regardless of the annoying chemicals or not, thermal paper is not ecologically (logically) friendly by any definition
You are unlikely to deal with a small part of the amount made by the cashier. But it is worth mentioning.
Inspired by this Hackaday post by [Donald Papp], this post points to [Larry Bank]’s Arduino library with photo printing for thermal printers, [Jeff Epler] has a new one at Adafruit (September 2021) 28th)’BLE Thermal “Cat” Printer Tutorial with CircuitPython [1][2][3] This resulted in a photo printing function driven by the cute little (but rather expensive IMHO) Adafruit CLUE nRF52840 Express Thermal printer with Bluetooth LE board and 1.3” 240×240 color IPS TFT display on board. [4]
Unfortunately, the CircuitPython code only prints an image preprocessed by a photo editing application (such as the free and open source cross-platform GIMP photo editor). [5] But to be fair, I doubt if a CLUE board with a Nordic nRF52840 Bluetooth LE processor, 1 MB flash memory, 256KB RAM, and a 64 MHz Cortex M4 processor running full CircuitPython has room to preprocess anything except simple The image-plank.
[Jeff Epler] wrote: When I saw the “cat” printer in this Hackaday article (https://hackaday.com/2021/09/21/mini-wireless-thermal-printers-get-arduino-library -and-macos -app/), I just need to prepare one for myself. The original poster made a library for Arduino, but I wanted to make a version suitable for CircuitPython.
2. Adafruit’s “BLE Thermal “Cat” Printer with CircuitPython” tutorial [single page html format]
https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/ble-thermal-cat-printer-with-circuitpython.pdf?timestamp=1632888339
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Post time: Oct-13-2021
