Thermal Printer (Series) Posts 📝

I have been playing around a lot with my thermal printer. While I have accomplished the initial goals I had in mind when I purchased the printer (create a program that prints my webmentions and print myself a daily update), I know there is still more that I can do with this device. Seeing how creative the Little Printer community was, I have been thinking up new modules to add to my thermal printer.

I have enjoyed crafting my daily update that is printed with the thermal printer. So far, my daily update includes, among other things, my schedule, the weather for the day, my RSS feed, a news update from The Guardian, and a tech news update from The Guardian. But I wanted to keep experimenting with the printer. Then I got an idea: why don't I try to add an IndieWeb word of the day to the update?

A key part of my "daily update" on the thermal printer is the daily calendar. This calendar shows all of the events I have in a day, as well as any tasks that I have added to Google Calendar as an all-day event. I also display all the birthdays and holidays in my daily update using some of the same code I use to retrieve my daily update. Birthdays and holidays are only printed on Mondays.

The title of this post must be in the running for the longest title for a blog post on this blog thus far. That aside, I just wanted to take a quick moment to say that the thermal printer project was mentioned on the Adafruit blog. For those who are not familiar with Adafruit, they are in the business of manufacturing and selling hardware. They sell a lot of hardware that works with the Raspberry Pi and Arduino, including the thermal printer that I am programming at the moment.

How would you like to send me a message that gets printed so that I can read it on paper? You can do this by sending me a webmention, which is a way of sending comments from your own website that I will then receive. Using webmentions, you can retain ownership over the comments you send other people. I know that webmentions are not widely used, and do require a bit of technical knowledge to use, but for now I can say I support printing webmentions.

I mentioned in my last post that I wrote a module that processed my RSS feeds. After further testing, this module turned out to be quite unreliable. It worked for my feed and a few others but was not robust enough to meet the varying ways in which people represent published dates on their blog RSS feeds. Because dates could be formatted in one of many ways, I would have to spend a lot of time gathering different timestamps and writing code that supported them. This was far from ideal. Also, I found some feeds were marked up using Atom and so might not have worked with my code.

In the first part of this series on my experiments with the Adafruit thermal printer I recently purchased, I mentioned how I was working on other modules for the thermal printer. A "module" refers to a specific program that retrieves information that I can print out using the thermal printer. The first module I built was the Aeropress recipe but at the time it was not much of a module because I had not written any other code yet. But I quickly began work on other modules.

A few days ago, I decided to purchase the Adafruit Thermal Printer, which was compatible with the Raspberry Pi. This thermal printer has been on my mind for a while but this week a reason for buying one came to mind (aside from the fun of experimenting with a thermal printer which was obvious to me). I decided that I wanted to generate a random Aeropress recipe that I could then print. I thought this would be both fun to create and, upon further reflection, good excuse for me to try new Aeropress recipes that I might otherwise not use. So this project would have been a nudge to help me get out of my Aeropress recipe rut.