#microprinter

[amieholt]

Horizontal Autoclave Power 7.6 kW

Labtron Horizontal Autoclave is a PLC-controlled, fully automatic vacuum sterilizer with a 60-L capacity, designed for up to 150°C and 0.26 MPa pressure. It features a 105–136°C sterilization range, automatic pulsation, temperature rise, sterilization, and drying processes.

[playroom]

1978 Centronics Microprinter P-1, with manual, diagram, and parallel port cable. Aluminum-coated paper roll.

Designed in USA, made by Japan.

[whichlights]

The Adafruit Learning System continues to impress. This is a thorough walkthrough on controlling a thermal printer with an arduino microcontroller, with example code and library.

[whichlights]

Printer appliance that can receive and print SMS, email, and webform messages posted to it on thermal paper. Sounds [familiar](http://microprinter.pbworks.com/). >With all these options the printer is suitable for practically any situation where messages need to be printed easily at a remote location. Some examples include: restaurants to receive orders, taxis to recieve instructions on new pickups and delivery drivers to receive address details.

[whichlights]

Parking Ticket Machine: An Anatomy >Each of these pay-and-display parking ticket machines costs in the region of US$11000, and there are more than 1200 of them around Copenhagen - and all they do is print little slips of paper to allow people to park their cars. An extreme example of "magnificent bits of infrastructure just lying around".

[sketchcards]

Papernet Design Pattern: Microprinters ### **Problem Summary** Print small bits of online data from a web service or mobile device, without drivers, formatting, or special software on the client ### **Example** [Ben O'Steen's MP Expense visualization](http://benosteen.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/making-the-physical-from-the-digital/) parses a Google Spreadsheet and generates receipts, which are linked back to the source material via a QRCode. ### **Usage** * Use for printing a stream of data (such as a twitter hashtag, @replies to a user, etc.) without human intervention * Use as a networked printer for links, triggered by a call to a web service -- as in the [instapaper](http://www.instapaper.com/) bookmarklet * Use when the output is intended to be ephemeral (e.g. directions to the pub you're meeting at, to be crumpled and tossed when you arrive) * Use when you want to collect data in real time and display it in a non-interruptive manner * Use when you want offline access to important information in situations where use of a smartphone or tablet may be awkward, inappropriate, or difficult * Use when the data to be printed is textual or graphically simple (e.g. a sparkline graph or QRCode) ### **Solution** An arduino and RS232-serial interface connect to the serial port on a simple thermal-paper printer. The arduino uses an ethernet shield to poll a custom hosted web service; the service receives the data to be printed and formats, then queues that data for the arduino. When the arduino receives a positive response from the service, it magic to receive the data, then prints to the thermal printer. From a user's perspective, what happens is, when a certain set of criteria is met -- a URL has been passed to a service via some mechanism such as email or a bookmarklet, or new data has appeared on an external service such as Google Alerts, Twitter, Tumblr, RSS feeds, etc. -- the microprinter prints a slip of flimsy thermal paper with the information on it. ### **Rationale** A microprinter provides a physical output mechanism for digital data. It's not so much a finished product as a sketch that points at a pattern: the low-friction way to produce little tangible icons of digital data.