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Add a really small 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 or computer, as you just plug it in via USB or TTL Serial to print text, barcodes, bitmap graphics, even a QR code!
This package comes with a Mini Thermal Receipt Printer, a USB cable, a JST cable, and a 4-pin TTL cable. One 33' roll of thermal paper is also included! The printer uses very common 2.25" wide thermal paper, and it can fit up to 33 ft of paper in the bay at once with a diameter of ≤ 30mm. The 33' long, 2.25" wide Thermal Paper Roll in our store works perfectly!
We have quite a few sizes of embeddable thermal printers, larger ones can hold more paper in the bay, but are of course larger. All are identical 'code wise', although some have slightly different baud rates. Check out our full range of thermal printers!
You will also need a 5 to 9V regulated power supply, that can provide 1.5A or more during the high-current print - our 5V 2A switching power supply will work very nicely. You'll need to give that external power if you are using USB for power, you cannot power it over the USB cable.
We really like this printer because its easy to make Bold, underline, inverted text, variable line spacing, left/center/right justification, barcodes in 11 standard formats with adjustable height, and even custom bitmap graphics.
Of course, we wouldn't leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - Our friends over at Adafruit have a full tutorial and matching Arduino library (inactive but still works) that demonstrates the following:
If you're using the built-in USB chip instead of TTL serial, you can use our Python example code
Note: This isn't a retail-level, professional printer! The print quality is legible but not always consistent in contrast. It's for fun projects for makers, not something to run a business with!
Note: As of Friday, April 1st 2016, we are now shipping this product with a right angled mini USB.