Have you built a printer?

[James Adam]

I'd love to hear from anyone who's put together a printer. I've seen quite a few connections that I don't recognise in our server logs - maybe that was you?

What are you using Printer for? Let us know!

- Jmes

[Rony Macarone]

Just finished mine...  can't get it to work though.

yellow light blinks okay...  all lights light on startup...

when i send a mail or use test print...  middle yellow led lights steady for a sec or 2, then the red goes solid and stays on.

also would be cool if you guys posted a schematic of the electronics... I don't quite understand the button hook-up?

Awesome job BTW!

[Ross t]

I put one together at the weekend using a soldered PCB. I also periodically experience the same issue.  I was going to install the server software and try again, so it could be an issue with the information sent to the printer. 

I found that missing the button let the printer print straight away :)

Likewise, thanks for the great tutorial and ideas :)

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Printer" group.
To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gfr-printer/-/X6kprayyM5IJ.
To post to this group, send an email to gfr-p...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to gfr-printer...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/gfr-printer?hl=en-GB.

[James Adam]

On Wednesday, 2 May 2012 21:07:39 UTC+1, rony wrote:

Just finished mine...  can't get it to work though.

yellow light blinks okay...  all lights light on startup...

when i send a mail or use test print...  middle yellow led lights steady for a sec or 2, then the red goes solid and stays on.

Hmm, this normally means that the size of the data downloaded from the server doesn't match the size indicated by the Content-Length header. If you have the printer connected to your computer, open the Arduino serial monitor and you should see some debugging output (if not, re-upload the sketch with the DEBUG definition uncommented). It should give some indication of what the error was.

If it *is* a problem writing the cache file to the SD card, you might want to wipe your SD and format it clean. I too have seen some intermittent issues in the past with problems writing to the SD card.

also would be cool if you guys posted a schematic of the electronics... I don't quite understand the button hook-up?

There's a Fritzing file in the repository (https://github.com/freerange/printer/blob/master/printer.fzz) which gives a clearer idea of the schematic. The button can be a bit confusion; basically the two pins opposite are normally connected, and so the resistor to ground pulls the value across the button to the input pin to 'LOW'. Pressing the button connects the pins diagonally, and the diagonal pin is wired to 5V, which brings the input pin to 'HIGH'. Makes sense?

Awesome job BTW!

Very kind. Let us know what you're printing!

- James / GFR 

[James Adam]

On Wednesday, 2 May 2012 21:20:28 UTC+1, digitales wrote:

I put one together at the weekend using a soldered PCB. I also periodically experience the same issue.  I was going to install the server software and try again, so it could be an issue with the information sent to the printer. 

Perhaps you could take a look at the debug output in the serial monitor too? (see above in this thread).

 

I found that missing the button let the printer print straight away :)

Yep, that will also normally work, although technically the value of the input pin is floating if the button isn't connected. A sure-fire way of printing immediately would be to connect the input pin to something set to 'HIGH', like the 5V pin on the opposite side of the Arduino.

I want to add behaviour to the server/Arduino which will allow certain prints to be printed immediately, while others wait for the button (see: https://github.com/freerange/printer/issues/8). The tricky part is that to do this, I think the Arduino needs to get a lot smarter about header parsing, since headers aren't guaranteed to be in any order. Maybe one of you might have an idea about how to do this, or might want to give it a go yourselves?

Likewise, thanks for the great tutorial and ideas :)

Thanks!

[rony]

hmmm... may need a new SD?


34417: Failed to clear cache for some reason
34426: starting request, cache size is 0
34442: Attempting to connect to printer.gofreerange.com
34673: Still connected
34673: No more data to read at the moment...
34678: Still connected
34703: No more data to read at the moment...
34751: Still connected
34776: No more data to read at the moment...
34824: Still connected
34880: Content length was: 0
34894: No more data to read at the moment...
34928: Server has disconnected
35068: Total bytes: 0

-- did re format card with this result.

Thanks!
35069: Duration: 395

[James Adam]

On Thursday, 3 May 2012 01:08:39 UTC+1, rony wrote:

hmmm...  may need a new SD?


34417: Failed to clear cache for some reason

35068: Total bytes: 0

--  did re format card with this result.

What filesystem did you reformat with? If you load some of the Arduino-provided example SD sketches, do they work with the SD card you have? Do you have another care you could try?

- James 

[rony]

Strange I replied here earlier and it disappeared?

Yes it was the SD card with the above issue.. changed it and all seems
ok with the sketch and the circuit...
however, I now have an issue with the printer.

send something to print. yellow LED lights for a second or two, green
LED lights...
press the button and the printer makes some very soft sounds and the
paper moves very slightly (-1mm)
the green led goes out and all is ready for another print.
no print comes out... the paper is not marked with a dark line...
nothing.

any ideas?

--Rony

[Ross t]

Good morning Rony,

Do you have an external power supply plugged in? The symptoms you describe sound like when I hadn't got enough power going to the printer.

Regards,

Ross t

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Printer" group.

[rony]

That was it... 9v does the trick! Thank you!
Printer name is; ardy

Where did I see a way to darken the prints?

On May 4, 1:46 am, Ross t <r.twee...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Good morning Rony,
>
> Do you have an external power supply plugged in? The symptoms you describe sound like when I hadn't got enough power going to the printer.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ross t
>

[James Adam]

On Friday, 4 May 2012 13:02:28 UTC+1, rony wrote:

That was it... 9v does the trick!  Thank you!
Printer name is; ardy

Where did I see a way to darken the prints?

https://github.com/freerange/printer/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Questions ("Q: My printouts aren't clear enough") :-)

- James

[James Jefferies]

We've got two printers up and running, Cathy & Heathcliff as part of
our work on the Happenstance project - http://happenstanceproject.com

Currently, Cathy is in the reception of the Site Gallery and
Heathcliff is in the office for experimentation purposes.

We're based for 10 weeks in Sheffield's Site Gallery and Cathy is
being used as simple visitor book/comment system. She's hooked up via
twilio to receive SMS text messages which are then sent a) to the
printer b) to twitter (@CathyPrint).

Heathcliff has been mobile recently too (see the Hardware Options
thread) !

They're great little printers and have created a lot of interest when
people have seen them in action.

You can read more about our adventures:

http://happenstanceproject.com/blog - Project blog
http://happenstancesheffield.tumblr.com/ - our tumblr site

@sheffhappens - Project twitter
@CathyPrint - Cathy twitter
@HeathcliffPrint - Heathcliff twitter

Thanks James for all your hard work!

[Bryan Mock]

Just got my printer hooked up and working. After some troubleshooting it worked by just connecting the printer to pins 8 and 9 and forgoing the bread board (no LEDs or button). Hope to be able to send notes to myself and quotes from ebooks. Some day I want to print small bitmaps of whole webpages, like a little amazon wishlist printout.

[James Adam]

On 3 Jan 2013, at 19:58, Bryan Mock <bryan...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Just got my printer hooked up and working. After some troubleshooting it worked by just connecting the printer to pins 8 and 9 and forgoing the bread board (no LEDs or button). Hope to be able to send notes to myself and quotes from ebooks. Some day I want to print small bitmaps of whole webpages, like a little amazon wishlist printout.

Glad to hear you got it up and running! Such a minimalist setup hadn't occurred to me, but I'm very pleased that it worked.

Out of curiosity, what sort of problems did you experience (you mention some troubleshooting...)?

- James

[Bryan Mock]

The printer was receiving data from the printer app, but it was printing gibberish. Also, when holding down the feed button while powering on the printer while connected to the bread board to see if it was the printer's fault it wouldn't print out the default character code and other text, it would only print CP437. While powering on with just the 5V adapter and no data it would print out the correct character code and other text just fine.

There are still some instances where I get gibberish, like with the bookmark app someone made on this forum, the paint, my printer, and mail app both work fine though.

[Bryan Mock]

just now i sent off this text to get printed (notes on good portfolios)

Drawing

Invention

Commitment

Character, content, visual weight, material sense, size/scale

Don't overdo it. Attempt to break some important convention

Among the many ingredients that help define an excellent portfolio; coherence and modesty are paramount. Plain is better than fancy; simple much better than complicated. The portfolio is a tool for conveying a sense of the work; it should not be an advertisement for itself 

     -Robert A.M. Stern

and the print is fine from stern up, but breaks at ingredients, becoming gibberish

[James Adam]

Does the printout appear fine in the print archive on the server? If so, then it's possible that either a) the darkness setting for your printer is set too high, or b) there's some unreliability in the download.

In the case of a), the higher the darkness setting, the slower the printer prints. However, the Ardunio is still sending commands to the printer as fast as it can (19200 b/s), so if the printer unit's memory buffer overflows, then the printing commands can become corrupted. You might be able to connect to the printer at a slower speed by modifying the serial connection setup in the Arduino sketch.

It's quite unlikely that there's download corruption (option b)), particularly since the fact the Arduino started printing at all implies that the downloaded content length matches the expected one from the server. However, it's still technically possible, I suppose.

- James

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Printer" group.

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gfr-printer/-/nbeIvv5Ks58J.

[Bryan Mock]

It looks fine on the server. I'll lower the darkness to 250 and see how it does. I think it might be the memory buffer overflow. I can get simple long lists to print just fine, but long, text dense prints have a chance of gibberish.