aftermarket IR printer

[c785]

Hi everyone,

With software emulators for various operating systems already available for the HP82240, I'm wondering whether anyone has tried to make a hardware emulator. I just discovered that there's a range of offers of $20 thermal printers from China that have a USB port and claim to use the ESC/POS command set. Given the many ESC/POS printers in use all over the world (and thus also available surplus or used) with various printer technologies (matrix, thermal, etc.), it would make sense to have an adapter that receives HP commands via an IR photodetector, then convert them to ESC/POS and dump them to the printer.

Does something like this exist? I guess it wouldn't take much more than a Raspberry Pi Zero (which already has a USB host interface) plus a photodiode to implement something like this.

If only I had a few evenings of free time to play around...