A unique project has been created by maker Murtaza Tunio the form of a thermal typewriter which uses a thermal point-of-sale printer to allow you to capture your thoughts, ideas and notes any printed format. Created as an art project the thermal typewriter allows you to transform mechanical keystrokes into physical letters on a sheet of paper.
It’s creator explains more about the idea and its implementation. “After using it for a while I can guarantee that the experience is indeed magical. It feels so nice and analog to write without using a screen. I have never experienced anything like this (save with an actual typewriter). Why is this special?”
– You can not see the line you are writing, it is hidden from view because the actual print head is buried five lines below the part where the paper leaves the machine.
– I made it so that there is no backspace. So every letter you write is committed to paper forever, it makes you think twice before mashing the keyboard.
– A side effect of not being able to see the previous 5 lines you wrote is that you have to keep track of what you have written. It forces you to maintain focus and flow — there is no way to check what you’ve written until it comes up and out of the printer.
“My life was made easy by a python library (python-escpos) which implements the standard protocol for communicating to thermal printers. Using this and a stackoverflow post which describes how to fetch individual key-presses (like getch()) without having to press Enter each time. I added a few special keys to cut the receipt and had to use a different key for Enter. And that is all, no fancy extras.”
For more details on the thermal typewriter project jump over to the Medium website by following the link below.
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