Ascii art toy easy serial#
Ascii art toy easy code#
Ascii art toy easy tv#

(I understand other computer brands also had ink pen printers.)Īsk Hackaday: What About Imperfect Features? 18 Comments The device could plot graphics or draw characters, so you could print out program listings and other text – on an approximately 4″-wide roll of paper. One of those was the *inexpensive* C= 1520 ink pen plotter/printer, which had 4 tiny ballpoint pens: black, red, green, and blue.

Ascii art toy easy serial#

(This story eventually leads back to printers.) The Commodore ViC-20, C=64, et al used a serial version of IEEE-488 to connect to peripherals.

Ascii art toy easy code#

I was interested at the time to learn from the Intel documentation that their IEEE-488 chip was “Intel Inside!” - internally, the chip was a microprocessor (8051 maybe?) following code and a state diagram in ROM telling it what to do for different inputs and outputs. In 1984-1985, I wrote the firmware handling the device interfaces (including GPIB/IEEE-488) on rack-mounted, Intel 80286 SBCs. Anyway, a pedantic correction: GPIB was IEEE’s version of HP’s existing HPIB, not the other way around! Posted in Art, Retrocomputing Tagged arduino, ascii art, inkjet Post navigationĪ slight correction, two years late I know, but this post was referenced in a Janupost, “Online Tool Turns STLs Into 3D ASCII Art”. Meanwhile, don’t miss the excellent video about the ASCII art printer cartridge, after the break. We’re no strangers to ’s work, but if you aren’t familiar with it, check out her inspiring talk from the 2019 Hackaday Superconference. If you still have yours, and would like turn out some rad ASCII art, the code for this project is up on GitHub. We really like this project, and are more than a little bummed we tossed those old printers that were kicking around the Hackaday labs for years. Upon reflection, it seems that power is being supplied by the printer status lines, Busy and/or Ack, through the input protection diodes of the Atmega328 on the nano. When she first hooked the Arduino to the printer’s parallel port, noticed that it powered right up with no external supply, and in true hacker fashion, just ran with it.

One of the coolest aspects of this project is the lack of power supply. The whole thing is ensconced within a slick 3D printed case. The user interface is foolproof: a single button press causes a random selection from one of ten ASCII images to be printed. Starting with a stripped-down Centronics printer cable that matches the printer’s port, she added an Arduino nano to store and serve up the art.

Ascii art toy easy tv#

The concept is something that might have been sold on late-night TV ads: a “cartridge” you plug into your printer to make ASCII masterpieces. With the new ink in place, and some tractor-feed paper acquired, started work on the art generator.

It seems you can’t escape the razor-and-blades model, though: had to pay $16 for a new ink cartridge to revive the $4 printer. notes that this printer would have cost around $1000 in today’s money - this is from a time before printer companies started selling the printer itself as a loss leader to make revenue on the back end selling consumables. Well, when found a vintage Kodak Diconix 150 inkjet at a local thrift store for $4, she knew what she had to do: turn it into a dedicated ASCII-art machine.ĭating to the mid-1980s, the diminutive printer she scored was an early example of consumer inkjet technology with only 12 “jets,” it sported a resolution roughly equivalent to the dot-matrix impact printers of the day. Readers of a certain age may fondly remember ASCII art emerging from line printers in a long-gone era of computing for others, it’s just wonderfully retro.