Oh no, he’s messing about with thermal printers again …

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Scored this cheapo USB printer on eBay: “High-speed 58mm POS Dot Receipt Paper Thermal Printer USB”. It identifies itself as a CATEX Technolog [sic] POS5890U, with a USB vendor:product ID of b000:0410. After a bit of random fiddling, it shows up as /dev/usb/lp0 on a Raspberry Pi. After turning off CUPS (as it nabs the device, not even letting root near it), you can print images up to 384 dots (48 mm at 8 dots/mm) wide using the ESC-POS GS v 0 command. You can use my esc-pos-image.py script if you wish, and if you need a test image …

(The photo is of Marie Doro; proto-goth 1902 style.)

4 comments

  1. please, please, please.. build something you can connect an iphone to and print photos out on thermal paper! I’d pay, like, around $100 bucks for that!

  2. Hello Sir,
    Actually i wanted a make my USB printer which does not have wifi or anything to connect rather then USB port so i was thinking to get RPi to make my printer wifi enabled so i can send data or click print from mobile/ipad.

    My question is thermal Printer connect with RPi via USB cable can make it wifi enabled?

    Please let me know..

    thankyou

  3. Yes, though I haven’t done it personally. Set up the thermal printer locally via USB, then share it with Samba. After that, installing avahi-discover is supposed to enable AirPrint

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