It’s great when a plan comes together. Having independently played around with my DottyMatrix serial-to-parallel printer interface and the Virtual Printer (designed to simulate my still-dead Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix printer), it was time to hook them together. And it worked! On the left is the DottyMatrix using my prototyping board for the ATMEGA328PB microcontroller. Its serial port… Read more »
In building my AVR ATMEGA328P-based ‘virtual parallel printer‘, there were two signals that required special treatment. So it was time to revisit interrupts. On a Centronics-style parallel port, the host machine sends an ‘init’ or reset signal to the printer to tell it to flush its buffers and set itself to the default state. It also sends a ‘strobe’ signal… Read more »
Here’s a tip for anyone building a device designed to interface with a parallel printer – you kind of need a parallel printer to test it on. That shouldn’t have been a problem. My DottyMatrix project – which will allow me to send data over a serial connection and have it printed on my Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix… Read more »