What is the MAX no of chars that can be printed from the IoT printer?

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someone_somewhere
 
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What is the MAX no of chars that can be printed from the IoT printer?

Post by someone_somewhere »

I can only manage 300 at a time, can this be increased?

How many can yours handle ...

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pburgess
 
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Re: What is the MAX no of chars that can be printed from the IoT printer?

Post by pburgess »

I think the printer's buffer is 256 characters. The latest version of the library tries to spool things out at a measured rate, but there's no hardware flow control so this is really an inexact science. You may need to break longer strings into smaller sections with a short delay() between each.

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someone_somewhere
 
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Re: What is the MAX no of chars that can be printed from the IoT printer?

Post by someone_somewhere »

ok heres what I've been thinking, is it possible to send an image (from a url) to the sd card and then get the printer to process the image (i.e turn it into bytes) and then print it out?

I don't understand how the files in the ruby directory come into the picture?

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pburgess
 
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Re: What is the MAX no of chars that can be printed from the IoT printer?

Post by pburgess »

The Ruby stuff is for pre-converting images to be stored as bitmaps in program flash memory.

The URL->SD->printer approach might be possible, but I don't think the Arduino's going to have the sauce to decode any but the most rudimentary GIF images, if at all. If you can do the image-to-bitmap conversion on the server end, or on a host PC, then it becomes more practical and the SD card might not even be necessary...I've done something similar using Processing, converting images and issuing them to the Arduino through the serial port (which does have flow control), carefully forwarding the data to the printer line-by-line to avoid overflowing the buffer.

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someone_somewhere
 
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Re: What is the MAX no of chars that can be printed from the IoT printer?

Post by someone_somewhere »

Sounds good, few questions (as always!)

How large is flash memory?

I'm pretty sure I'll be able to convert images to bitmap on the server side, how can we then send this to the printer, and how would it go about printing this image?

I would prefer not using the serial port and making it standalone internet based.

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someone_somewhere
 
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Re: What is the MAX no of chars that can be printed from the IoT printer?

Post by someone_somewhere »

Found out that flash memory is 32k

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