Description
Add a mini printer to any microcontroller project with this very cute thermal printer. Thermal printers are also known as receipt printers, they’re what you get when you go to the ATM or grocery store. Now you can embed a little printer of your own into an enclosure. This printer is ideal for interfacing with a microcontroller, you simply need a 3.3V – 5V TTL serial output from your microcontroller to print text, barcodes, bitmap graphics, even a QR code!
The thermal printer takes 2.25″ (57mm) wide thermal paper with a max roll diameter of 1.5″ (39mm). Thermal paper is inexpensive and commonly found in most office supply stores in 85ft lengths. You may have to remove some paper from these rolls in order for it to fit into the printer. But, you can always use the excess paper in the printer, since you don’t need to have a ‘core’ in the paper for it to work.
The back panel has 2 3-pin connectors; one for power and one for serial communication. The thermal printer ships with the default 19200 baud rate. If you’re using this printer in conjunction with an Arduino, you’re going to need to connect it to the “Vin” pin and attach an external power supply, as the printer will draw more current than USB is capable of delivering. We’ve found that these printers can draw about 1.5A because they need to generate heat, the best supply for the job is our laptop-style power supply.
We really like this printer because it is easy to make Bold, underline, inverted text, variable line spacing, left / center / right justification, barcodes (UPC A, UPC E, EAN13, EAN8, CODE39, I25, CODEBAR, CODE93, CODE128, CODE11 and MSI) with adjustable height, and even custom bitmap graphics.
Technical Details
- Input Voltage: 5 – 9V, 1.5A
- Paper: 2.25″ wide, 50 ft or shorter thermal paper
- Printing Speed: 50 – 80mm/s
- Resolution: 8 dots/mm, 384 dots/line
- Effective Printing Width: 48mm
- Character Set: ASCII, GB2312-80 (Chinese)
- Print Font: ANK:5×7, Chinese: 12×24, 24×24
- Paper Type: Thermal paper
- Paper Width: 57.5 ±0.5mm
- Paper Roll Diameter: Max 39mm
- Protocol: TTL Serial, 19200 baud
- Mean Cycles Before Failure: 5 million lines
- Operating Temperature: 5 – 50°C
- Dimensions: 111 x 64 x 56mm
- Weight: 161g
Shipping List
- 1x Thermal Printer