Print42 - thermal printer software for Free42

[tcab]

I managed to compile Free42 on the Raspberry Pi. As Thomas said, its dead easy:

Code:

sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev
git clone https://github.com/thomasokken/free42.git
cd free42/gtk
make
./free42bin

Not sure whether I should have run the build-gtk script instead?, but the resulting binary free42bin using the steps above seems to have worked OK (though I did get a few compile warnings flying past...)

I then ran Print42 and was able to echo output from Free42 onto my thermal printer - all on the Raspberry Pi.

Print42 was unable to automatically detect the location of the Free42 printout text file (Print42 tries to guess via inspecting the Free42 state file, which it thinks is in /home/pi/.local/share/Free42/state but the Free42 state file is not there - I'll have to find out where the proper location is and tweak that in the next release of Print42). Its no big deal, I just browsed to the location of the Free42 printout text file manually via Print42. For those that haven't tried it yet, you can set the location of the Free42 printout text file to any file you want, in any location, using Free42 preferences.

Here is a photo of my setup. Epson thermal printer in the foreground, Raspberry Pi 4 on the right in the official case, minus the lid. I have some heatsinks installed, and have an USB powered external fan (barely visible behind the screen on the left) running directed at the Pi - the fan is plugged into one of the Pi USB ports.

Now onto what you can see on the screen... Free42 is successfully running on the left of the screen, with the Free42 printout window next to it. Then Print42 on the extreme right of the screen, detecting Free42 printout activity and writing to the thermal printer. The terminal window can be seen in the background, with remnants of the compile that built Free42 on the Pi.



The next step might be to copy both Free42 and Print42 programs to my other Pi, which has its own touchscreen and looks like a calculator - kind of :-) Here is an even older version of my Pi based calc.