Dot-Matrix Printer Brings Old School Feel to Today’s Headlines

If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re …read more

If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly into our phones, selected by algorithms perfectly tuned to rile us up on whatever the hot-button issue du jour happens to be. Welcome to the future. If like us you long for a simpler way to get your news, [Andrew Schmelyun] has a partial solution with this dot-matrix news feeder. It’s part of his effort to detox a bit from the whole algorithm thing and make the news a little more concrete. He managed to chase down a very old Star Micronics printer with a serial interface, which he got on the cheap thanks to the previous owner not being sure if it worked. It did, at least after some cleaning, and thanks to a USB-to-serial and the efforts of Linux kernel hackers through the ages, was able to echo output to the printer from a Raspberry Pi Zero W. From there, getting a daily news feed was as simple as writing some PHP code to mine the APIs of a few selected services. We’re perplexed and alarmed to report that Hackaday is not among the selected sources, but we’re sure this was just a small oversight that will be corrected in version 2. The program runs as a cron job so that a dead-tree version of the day’s top stories is ready for [Andrew]’s morning coffee. We’ve seen similar news printers before; we particularly like this roll-feed paper version. But for a seriously retro feel, we’d love to see this done on a real teletype. This idea reminds me a bit of my dad.
He once had hacked an electric typewriter on thermal printer basis into a serial printer.
The keyboard was removed, the electronic PCB was visible.
You could attach it to a COM port (DOS) or AUX port (CP/M) and have it work like a printer.
On DOS, it was possible to pipe output to COM port or to COPY files to it.
(If it still had a keyboard, COPY CON and CTTY might have been useful, too.)
He used this thing as a simple printer for listings and other niche application, I believe.
He also had an HP LaserJet Plus at the time, I think, for business use.
Must have been in mid-80s or so. For some time at one job I had about 30 years ago I spent around half an hour every afternoon printing out a load of data from a Reuters terminal to pick through for the data I needed to enter into our database.
In one respect I’m glad I no longer have to spend lengthy amounts of time listening to the noise of a dot-matrix printer. In another respect, no dot-matrix printer I ever owned nagged me to connect it to the internet. No dot matrix printer I ever owned regularly spammed me. No dot-matrix printer I ever owned would dry up if you hadn’t used it for a while, or charge you if you print more than so many pages a month, ribbons would slowly fade rather than suddenly give up and weren’t as expensive as ink-jet ink. Swings and roundabouts. Swings and roundabouts. But they should totally make this work on an old teletype! Get a Brother laser printer ( black and white or color.) They work well. They don’t “dry up.” They don’t need an internet connection. They don’t charge by the page. They don’t nag you to buy more supplies. They work well under Linux. Photocylinder of laser printers does dry up (or fail otherwise)(I was lead to believe that low humidity contributes to failure). Unlike inkjet printer nozzles, the failure is gradual. that is the 1st time hearing about it…dealt with laser printers exposed to metal and grit dust, incompetent users, cheap dusty paper…the photocylinders in cheap machines would either last as advertised or be physically damaged from dust/foreign objects. The big office machines all use a transfer belt or drum, those all lasted as they should have, some of the beaters that were returned from lease still work almost 10 years later gradually degrading from continued use. For those with a dot matrix printer they are trying to revive: 1) If the ribbon is faint and it’s jst after office depot closes, unspool the ribbon into a ziplock and give it a squirt of WD40 , and respool. 2) Ungunk the printhead by removing it, place the needle side in some paper towel, and give the rear bottom of the head a squirt of WD40 to wash out the old ink and reassemble. Trivia: I did a prototype printer controller for Epson’ and their 3110 dot matrix printer mechanism way back in the 70’s when I worked at Q1. My Brother printer will print from my PC, my phone, heck, even my raspberry pi desktop I have for giggles without any added software, all wirelessly. They all just see it on my LAN and print to it. By far the easiest to use printer I’ve ever owned. I have something similar but with dot-matrix point of sales printer. Every morning a fresh a quote from https://zenquotes.io Brings back nice memories working at the university radio station. One of my earliest hardware/software hacks I remember doing was making a level shifter so I could use a teletype as a printer for my TRS-80 model 1. Never got it working as an input device…I wanted to try to use the paper tape punch/reader as a storage device. Nice! Pity on the paper tape; surely more reliable than the cassette, and possibly faster on the read. Back in the day, I built a current-loop interface to drive my ASR-33 Teletype with my Commodore 64. Upper-case only, of course. I used it for program listings while working on a FORTH that I never finished. I really do wish hadn’t let either of those machines slip through my fingers. C64? If you have a RTTY cartridge (Bonito etc) you can decode RTTY news, too! 😃
https://www.rtty.com/itty/index.htm
If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old.
Hmph! I actually used to work on products you could put in printers to receive news wire feeds (hi and lo tts, baudot, etc.). Ch 4 NY News had them and I could hear them running while the news was being aired. 😀 I had a TI 810. Fast, robust and LOUD! Don’t really miss it, now have an HP LaserJet 5 that I salvaged and rebuilt. Equally robust and dependable. I’d think the hardest part about this whole thing would be getting the tractor feed paper, I haven’t seen that in forever! Les Nessman : [on the air] A following bulletin has just been received on the WKRP teletype. “Monster lizzard ravages east coast. Mayors in five New England cities have issued emergency requests for federal disaster relief as a result of the giant lizzard that descended on the east coast last night. Officials say this lizzard, the worst since ’78, has devastated transportation, disrupted communications, and left many hundreds homeless.” Dr. Johnny Fever : [interrupting] Monster lizard? Les Nessman : The wire service never lies. Dr. Johnny Fever : [shutting down the broadcast, then turning it back on after he’s done speaking] Les, the B is out on the printer. It’s monster blizzard. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard touring the east coast promo. Must see shows. Their videos are ape. You’ve got the “dot matrix” rag mis-spelt on this article. Under the correct tag I found this very similar project from a few years ago: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/18/apple-ii-prints-off-the-breaking-news/#more-456746 I get annoyed that the term “dot-matrix” is being used for “dot-matrix impact printers”. Laser printers and ink jet printers are also “dot-matrix” printers. Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy) This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
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https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/dot-matrix-printer-brings-old-school-feel-to-todays-headlines/