Tag Archives: Badge

Who’s been labelling things in the space?

It’s very nearly Christmas, but there’s time for us to share one more hack.

Lots of printing, some of it good.

Lots of test prints, one good badge.

A little while ago, John brought an old till receipt printer to the hackspace to be hacked. Recently the temptation to do something with it got the better of me. You may [or may not] remember from the post about all the retro computer projects in the space, that I have a ZX spectrum that I’ve been playing around with lately. It’s a 48k Spectrum and I’ve got a Kempston Centronics E Interface for it. The centronics interface lets it talk to any printer with a centronics connection. John’s printer is actually fairly modern. It certainly wasn’t around in the eighties when the spectrum was. I think it’s probably mid-noughties era. It’s an Epson TM-T88ii. Nevertheless, it’s fairly easy to get the spectrum to drive this modern printer.

After a little bit of trial and error to get all the right escape sequences for text size, boldness, justification and cutting the paper after a print, I was able to get the spectrum to print name badges. I wrote a program that asks for your name and prints a “Hi, my name is…” badge on receipt paper.

If you have a spectrum with a centronics interface and a suitable printer, you can give the program a try! The code is on github in the form of a wav file recorded direct from the spectrum used here.

A word of caution if you do though, you might get carried away with yourself. When it’s as easy as just typing in a string and pressing enter, you’ll print lots of badges. I will leave you with these photos of the many badges I left around the space.

Have a great Christmas.

Dan.