red eye/82240 IR receiver to computer?

[tgray]

I've seen several projects to recreate the 82240 printers with modern components, but not much in the way of 'finished' instructions. Does anyone have any interest in cobbling together a unit that either:

1. streams to a host computer over USB text (acting like a keyboard)
2. plugs directly into a POS thermal printer, USB or serial
   

The first use case would be opening up a text editor and streaming your printed output to it via IR. The second would be a replacement using modern components. Maybe this has already been done. I've seen Martin Hepperle's project as well as ziggurat29's. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find the code associated with either...

[ijabbott]

(11-17-2018 12:49 AM)tgray Wrote:  I've seen several projects to recreate the 82240 printers with modern components, but not much in the way of 'finished' instructions. Does anyone have any interest in cobbling together a unit that either:

1. streams to a host computer over USB text (acting like a keyboard)
2. plugs directly into a POS thermal printer, USB or serial
   

The first use case would be opening up a text editor and streaming your printed output to it via IR. The second would be a replacement using modern components. Maybe this has already been done. I've seen Martin Hepperle's project as well as ziggurat29's. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find the code associated with either...

The Arduino code for Martin's project is linked to from his hidden (?) HP page: https://www.mh-aerotools.de/hp/

When I built my unit, I originally copied the code out of the PDF, but copying code out of a PDF completely screws up the formatting and other problems that need to be fixed up in a text editor. I found the link to the code later on.

Christoph Giesselink's HP Printer Simulator can read the data from the Arduino via a serial connection (the Nano has a USB serial link) and show it in a window.

Perhaps tcab's POS printer software (as seen on this forum) could send that to a modern thermal printer.

What is missing is a nice all-in-one unit (or at least a unit that interfaces to the IR receiver and an off-the-shelf ESC/POS printer), perhaps based around a raspberry pi or an ESP32, perhaps using bluetooth for the printer connection.

[tgray]

Not sure how I missed the link to the code. Thanks!

Does Martin's unit only work with Christoph Giesselink's HP Printer? What is the output of Martin's unit on the computer side?

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(11-17-2018 12:40 PM)tgray Wrote:  Thanks!What is the output of Martin's unit on the computer side?

The phsical connection would be by USB cable. The data protocol and format is described in quite some detail in the header part of the Arduino code from his page (IR_RedEye.ino). If you have no Arduino software yet you can open that file with any text editor. For more specific questions better contact him in person, he is a memeber of this forum!

Regards
Max

[Harald]

(11-17-2018 11:23 AM)ijabbott Wrote:  What is missing is a nice all-in-one unit (or at least a unit that interfaces to the IR receiver and an off-the-shelf ESC/POS printer), perhaps based around a raspberry pi or an ESP32, perhaps using bluetooth for the printer connection.

You are aware of this, aren't you?