hi, I am in troubel to write a driver program for thermal dot line printer head. i don't know ,how to send the data of different font to this printer head. If any come accross these work, please help me. They are using Atmel processor.There are six primary leads on the head. they are thermistor, clock,data,latch,strobe1, strobe2. I want to know , how the data format is. My advance thanks for you.
tamilmarans
Serial thermal printer heads like this are essentially a single scan line (raster) the full width of the page. You need to create your image in memory as a raster image, then shift it a bit at a time into the print head. Once the line is loaded into the head the strobes are selected one at a time for a very short period to cause the pixels on the head to heat up, burning the image into the thermal paper.
Thermal heads can be quite fussy and are easy to damage. Unless there is strobe width protection built into the head you can start a fire with them very rapidly.
On the other hand, with the right algorithms you can make them print true gray-scale images without dithering or pattern manipulation.
Scott
AFAIK these print heads produce a single vertical line of dots. You send serial data to the data line and clock it into an internal shift register with the clock. For thermal management reasons you then pulse strobe one followed by strobe 2 to print the complete line. The print head then moves, or the medium moves beneath it and the process is repeated. Therefore you have to provide the correct sets of dots to make up the characters of the font you desire. One way to do this is to store the sets of dots for each character on memory (ROM) and access them using the character as an offset into the data.#
HTH
Ian
-- Ian Bell
thank you for your information..... but i am not clear about raster. i have a forn generator which will convert from bitmap to some font bonary format.... how i should sotre these binary format in to the memory. If any body having the driver program for the same... please give the out line . thank you
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