This retro printer creates my daily newsletter and more… using PHP

[@LenWoodward]

Very fun - I had no idea it was so easy to interface with a physical printer!

[@realworlddev]

This is one of the best videos on KZbin. Hats off to you Andrew, real computing proving it's worth. I'd be interested to know if you can control certain printer properties from here too. For example, remove page margins or fool the printer to think the paper is a different size, without having to change the settings in the driver or OS. Would you think that's doable?

[@aschmelyun]

For this _particular_ printer, it does look like it! The instruction manual goes super in-depth for things like margins, line heights, paper sizes, automatically skipping over the perforations in the paper, etc. It's all done through the use of command codes that are either set once and stay in-memory (like line height) or have to be sent each time a new line or block of data is sent.

[@brunoggdev6305]

thats so cool!!

[@ChrisSteffensmeier-r9t]

Thanks for the forecast! Could you help me with something unrelated: My OKX wallet holds some USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (mistake turkey blossom warfare blade until bachelor fall squeeze today flee guitar). Could you explain how to move them to Binance?

[@michaeldomanski2472]

I have a new Epson LX-350 9 pin dotmatrix, USB connectivity to my Mac. I got the "Simple PHP Server" app, Downloaded your code from git hub, made a couple mods, BUT am stuck in the printer path lp0, lp1 etc. does not work. still trying to figure out what the /dev/usb device is for my printer, but i can lpr print a text file to my printer, so it does work, I just need to figure out how to echo "Hello, world!" > /dev/usb/lp0. running mac OS X 10.15.7... still searching... need to get this working--->. $printer = fopen("/dev/usb/lp0", "w"); what the heck is my EPSON USB Printer in dev/usb/lp0". I dont have an lp0 in /dev??

[@lupinzar]

I did PHP development for years and I've used it for personal command line scripts before. But this is the first time I've seen anyone else use it for that in the wild. You might get some crap for it; don't listen to it. Does this printer not require a carriage return ( ) as well as a line feed ( )? Or was that just an old teletext thing? I haven't used a character printer in decades.

[@aschmelyun]

There's a set of DIP switches under the ribbon that control some more technical features of the printer. One of those is whether or not a line feed also implies a carriage return automatically, and it's by default set to ON.