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.)

Comments

4 Responses to “Oh no, he’s messing about with thermal printers again …”

  1. Austin Avatar

    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. scruss Avatar

    Raspberry Pi + CUPS already provides airprint support, Austin.

  3. Gautam Avatar
    Gautam

    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

  4. scruss Avatar

    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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