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Tiny Thermal Receipt Printer - TTL Serial / USB

2751

Elmwood Electronics has stopped accepting orders. This product might be available at PiShop.ca. Please check this blog post about our recent team merger.

Add a really small printer to any microcontroller project with this very cute thermal printer. Thermal printers are also known as receipt printers, they're what you get when you go to the ATM or grocery store. Now you can embed a little printer of your own into an enclosure. This printer is ideal for interfacing with a microcontroller or computer, as you just plug it in via USB or TTL Serial to print text, barcodes, bitmap graphics, even a QR code!

This package comes with a Mini Thermal Receipt Printer, a USB cable, a JST cable, and a 4-pin TTL cable. One 33' roll of thermal paper is also included! The printer uses very common 2.25" wide thermal paper, and it can fit up to 33 ft of paper in the bay at once with a diameter of ≤ 30mm. The 33' long, 2.25" wide Thermal Paper Roll in our store works perfectly!

We have quite a few sizes of embeddable thermal printers, larger ones can hold more paper in the bay, but are of course larger. All are identical 'code wise', although some have slightly different baud rates.  Check out our full range of thermal printers!

You will also need a 5 to 9V regulated power supply, that can provide 1.5A or more during the high-current print - our 5V 2A switching power supply will work very nicely. You'll need to give that external power if you are using USB for power, you cannot power it over the USB cable.

We really like this printer because its easy to make Bold, underline, inverted text, variable line spacing, left/center/right justification, barcodes in 11 standard formats with adjustable height, and even custom bitmap graphics.

Of course, we wouldn't leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - We have a full tutorial and matching Arduino library that demonstrates the following:

  • Printing with small, medium and large text
  • Bold and underline text
  • Inverted text
  • Variable line spacing
  • Left, center and right justification
  • Barcodes in the following standard formats: UPC A, UPC E, EAN13, EAN8, CODE39, I25, CODEBAR, CODE93, CODE128, CODE11 and MSI - with adjustable barcode height
  • Custom monochrome bitmap graphics!
  • How to include a QR code

If you're using the built-in USB chip instead of TTL serial, you can use our Python example code

Technical Details

Note: We are now shipping this product with a right angled mini USB. 

  • Requires ~2.25" wide paper roll
  • Paper roll diameter: ≤ 30mm
  • Paper roll length: 33'
  • Power Voltage: 5~9V
  • Connectors: 9600 baud TTL or USB
  • Windows XP/Vista/7/8 or MacOS X 10.9 to 10.11 PL2303 USB drivers. Newer Mac drivers available @ Prolific
  • Printing Speed: 25-70mm/s
  • Resolution: 8 dots/mm. 384 dots/line
  • Barcode support: EAN13, EAN8, Code39, Code93, Code128, ITF, Codebar, UPC-A, UPC-E, QRCode, PDF417
  • Color: Black
  • Printer Dimensions: 58mm x 82mm x 44.3mm / 2.3" x 3.2" x 1.7"

Collections: Adafruit in Canada

Type: USB