Thermal printer

Hi Mike,

I am facing a problem now in designing of my hardware. I have to interface a thermal \ dot-matrix printer (3” to 5” paper width) with my hardware. I am planning to use PIC18F450 as my controller. Is it is possible to interface a serial printer with this controller. If possible, can you guide me how to do it.

Post moved to own thread by moderator!

Easily possible, just connect via a suitable interface and send data as specified by the data sheet for the printer.

Hi Goodwin,

Thanks for your replay. I want one more help from you.
Can u help me to find a sample schematic, in which PIC is
interfaced with a Printer ...

Don't believe you defined 'serial' as either USB or RS232. Either way, it still a serial port, just like connecting a computer to your PIC. There is a lot of stuff on this, many boards for AVR, so you must get hundreds of thousands of hits on Google.com. Believe Nigel's tutorials have a section on PC->PIC. Hardware should be the same, most of the software should be the same. Only difference would be what is sent to the printer and how fast.

you'll most likely need a level shifter of some sort (max232 for example), which is covered in all the popular tutorials.

after you get the '232 working, the rest is pretty much plug and play - cable from the printer to the '232 ... wires from the '232 to the pic

here's some detail on a simple rx/tx shifter board I built a while back ... it's designed to be small and to easily plug into a breadboard

https://projects.dimension-x.net/archives/84