Styled Printer

Simple NodeJS Scripts to print beautiful layouts on your Adafruit/Sparkfun Thermalprinter.

Features

🎨 Custom Layouts – Bypass layout limits

⚡️ React – Send from react-app with live-chat

🐘 Postgres – Connect to database and archive

Motivation

The idea was simple: People should be able to send a message to a remote thermal printer hooked up to a raspberrypi. Since the built in layout capabilities of the thermal printer and its library are really limited, I wanted to enable things like custom Fonts, proper typography, svgs and more. The Input should be located on a react-app with a live chat displaying all sent messages, while the server should archive sent messages in a database.

How to run!

This Repository is set up as a mono-repo containing the frontend, server and printer sources in three different folders.

Server

$ cd server
$ yarn install

In order to archive all printed messages, the project is currently set to connect to a postgres database. I reccomend doing it locally for devleopment and playarround but you can also connect to a production database. You can change the settings for your development and production database in server/knexfile.js. Edit your schema in server/migrations/schema. For detailed documentation visit Knex. Spin up a Database and run

$ knex migrate:latest

If you need to know how to get a local database up and running, visit DockerHub–Postgres.

Super! Everything is set, lets start the Server by running

$ yarn start

Frontend

Set your Server-IP in frontend/src/app.js:32

const s = io("000.000.0.00:8080");

$ cd frontend
$ yarn install
$ yarn start

Printer

Install node and npm on your RaspberryPi. Go to your raspi-config and enable "Serial" under the Networking Options.

$ sudo raspi-config

Copy the "printer" folder to your RaspberryPi. And set your Server-IP in printer/print.js:9

const s = io("000.000.0.00:8080");

$ cd printer
$ npm install
$ npm start

Customize

If you want to edit the layout generated by the RaspberryPi, edit the file index.html located in printer/gen/. You'll find css, js and html in one file.

Passed Parameters

Paramter	Origin
Date	Generated
Message	Input Field
Author	Input Field

Credits

Code and Graphics by Leo Mühlfeld. This Project had its origins at the development of owe.zone. Original Idea & huge amount of help by Timo Lins! Demo Picture features Faune Typeface by Alice Savoie / Cnap.