Thermal printer dynamic image printing

For other supported Arduino products from Adafruit: Shields, accessories, etc.

Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.
Locked
User avatar
V0SSgod
 
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue Sep 24, 2013 4:40 pm

Thermal printer dynamic image printing

Post by V0SSgod »

Hi all,

I was wondering if there is a way to reduce the amount of steps needed to print a bitmap image.

Let's say I have a black and white image already sized at 384px wide.

My current method involves converting it using the Processing sketch, copying the .h to the Arduino directory, and then updating an Arduino sketch to print.

How can I make this more dynamic -- where I just have a b&w image, possibly press a button and have it print?

Not sure if this is a stretch.

Thanks.

User avatar
adafruit_support_mike
 
Posts: 67446
Joined: Thu Feb 11, 2010 2:51 pm

Re: Thermal printer dynamic image printing

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

The trick is turning the image into a series of bit-values the Arduino can send to the printer.

In theory the Arduino could open an image file, read the data, and convert it to information the printer could use, but the code to do that ends up taking more memory than the array version of the image.

User avatar
technerdchris
 
Posts: 46
Joined: Sun Nov 25, 2012 4:08 am

Re: Thermal printer dynamic image printing

Post by technerdchris »

There's a thorough discussion of the process in this thread.

I am successfully writing dynamic 384x384 bitmap array using the 32k of SRAM from a chipKIT uC32 and printing it. I'm doing the write up now and will be sharing the code as part of the post.

In my case, I set each x,y pixel programmatically. You can make a static array if you don't want to manually make all the x.y's.

User avatar
jack2300
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 6:23 am

Re: Thermal printer dynamic image printing

Post by jack2300 »

Hello there,
Does anyone have any answer to this question?
What type of QR code, static or dynamic, is an ideal for printing in a business card?
Thanks in advance

User avatar
adafruit_support_mike
 
Posts: 67446
Joined: Thu Feb 11, 2010 2:51 pm

Re: Thermal printer dynamic image printing

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

If you want to print the same QR code every time, it will probably be easiest to save it to an SD card and print it as a bitmap.

Locked
Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.

Return to “Other Arduino products from Adafruit”