Using an ESP8266 to print RSS feeds to a vintage thermal printer #ESP8266 @cbmwifi
Jan Derogee believes retro printers often don’t get the love of vintage microcomputers.
I wanted to make a video about this project right from the start and I fantasized a scene about the telexes of the past, whizzing and buzzing all day long spewing out the latest, with a nostalgic and noisy charm.
My latest project is about a 30 year old printer printing the latest news. Basically it’s an RSS feed decoded by an ESP8266 of which the title, description and pubdate fields are send to a Brother HR-5C. A small and forgotten thermal printer of the 80’s. Which surprisingly works great and consumables like thermal paper are readily available in 2022.
The PCB is very simple, just an ESP8266, some level shifting transistors.
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