Hey everyone!
I’ve had an idea for an interesting project: The Feed Printer.
An old school dot-matrix printer fed by a continuous ream of paper that
prints out tweets (or any such consumable data) in real time.
I like the concept of it, taking a continuous, virtual feed and making
it a continuous hard copy feed. Plus I just love sensory nature of
dot-matrix printers when they’re working - you can see the moving parts
and they make a nice sound.
I was thinking it could be extended to print any tweets that mention
given tag - could become the HACman printer - where we follow what
people are saying about us!!!
Should be easy to do - these printers take streams of ascii text and
just print straight out.
Interfacing with the parallel port may be an issue, I’ve found a couple
of ICs designed for serial->parallel specifically for interfacing with
printers, just can’t find anywhere to buy one - any suggestions are
welcome!
Anyway, I’m trying to get a hold of a dot-matrix printer with
tractor-feed to take a continuous ream of paper - I’ve seen a few on
eBay but thought I’d check if anyone has one knocking about at the
office that I could have ?
Youll find a lot of the dot matrix printers have serial ports, makes
interfacing to them a lot easier!
Otherwise, parallel for text printing isnt that difficult, it’d be doable
with (iirc) 13 pins on your chip of choice.
-BobOn 7 February 2010 21:55, Guy Thouret guy@thouret.co.uk wrote:
Hey everyone!
I’ve had an idea for an interesting project: The Feed Printer.
An old school dot-matrix printer fed by a continuous ream of paper that
prints out tweets (or any such consumable data) in real time.
I like the concept of it, taking a continuous, virtual feed and making
it a continuous hard copy feed. Plus I just love sensory nature of
dot-matrix printers when they’re working - you can see the moving parts
and they make a nice sound.
I was thinking it could be extended to print any tweets that mention
given tag - could become the HACman printer - where we follow what
people are saying about us!!!
Should be easy to do - these printers take streams of ascii text and
just print straight out.
Interfacing with the parallel port may be an issue, I’ve found a couple
of ICs designed for serial->parallel specifically for interfacing with
printers, just can’t find anywhere to buy one - any suggestions are
welcome!
Anyway, I’m trying to get a hold of a dot-matrix printer with
tractor-feed to take a continuous ream of paper - I’ve seen a few on
eBay but thought I’d check if anyone has one knocking about at the
office that I could have ?
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