mini Thermal printer defected

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letellim
 
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mini Thermal printer defected

Post by letellim »

Hello Adafruit Support,

I just bought a mini thermal printer starter kit for a personal project.
https://www.adafruit.com/products/600
Unfortunately, it is not working correctly. It has some strange behavior.
Especially the Printertest.py does not work properly and we are not able to print the inverseOn, the barcode...
When we try to print big text, the printer seems to shut down and restart.
Then we have sometimes some strange characters that are printed and sometime the lines are superimposed.

We connected the printer to a raspberry pi and use the 5V 2a power supply of the starter kit exactly as the tutorial of your website.
https://learn.adafruit.com/pi-thermal-printer?view=all

Do you have any idea what is wrong? Is the printer broken?

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letellim
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by letellim »

By the way,
if I don't plug my raspberry, but only in the same power supply than the printer : the raspberry shut down when I try to send information to print.

Regards

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

It sounds like the printer doesn't have enough power.

The 2A power supply is only strong enough to run the printer. It can't deliver enough current for the printer and a RasPi.

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letellim
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by letellim »

Hello,

Thanks for the reply.
The raspberryPi is connected by itself with another power supply.
For the printer we used the power supply you sending us.
Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks
Regards

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Post a photo of how you have things connected and we'll see if that gives us any clues.

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letellim
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by letellim »

Hello,
the connection is very simple and follow your tutorial.

first part :
Red wire on the + of power supply, the black one on the -.
second part :
Yellow wire on the TXD pin of the raspberry and the black one to a ground pin of the raspberry pi. The green one is not used.

The raspberry pi is also connected to power with the usb and an ipad power supply.

I believe that the problem come from the thermal printer, probably defected?
We can't do anything with it since we have a lot of strange random printed letters.

Thanks
Regards

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

We'd like to take a look at the physical connections. If nothing else, it helps us assemble a casefile to support a replacement.

Please post a photo of your harwdare and connections.

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letellim
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by letellim »

Hello,

Here some pictures of our hardware and connections.

Thanks,
Regards
Attachments
IMG_3766.JPG
IMG_3766.JPG (842.02 KiB) Viewed 1268 times
IMG_3765.JPG
IMG_3765.JPG (844.99 KiB) Viewed 1268 times
IMG_3764.JPG
IMG_3764.JPG (978.76 KiB) Viewed 1268 times

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Thank you.

Try connecting an ammeter between the terminal block power adapter's + terminal and the printer's VCC line.. let's see how much current is getting through. It might be a problem with the power supply more than a problem with the printer.

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letellim
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by letellim »

Hello,
I don't have any ammeter. We had to buy another power supply and this is now better.
Could you please give us a refund of this defected product and the additional costs that we had.
Regards

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

It was a power supply problem then.

Send a note to [email protected] with a link to this thread and the folks there will work out a replacement or refund for the power supply you have now.

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letellim
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by letellim »

Hello,

thanks for all your reply. I receive the new package.
We don't have anymore (almost) the strange character. But we know have a bad print quality.
The black is not totally black and always in the same place.
We print an image containing a logo and some text. The text is always bad quality.
(see attachment, you can see that the two first line of text are very bad quality, the next one is not that bad)

Could you please help me to know the reason.

Thanks
Regards
Attachments
IMG_3896.JPG
IMG_3896.JPG (489.54 KiB) Viewed 1136 times

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pburgess
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by pburgess »

These printers can be really picky about thermal settings. Let's try a couple of things.

First, when you call printer.begin(), you can optionally pass a 'heat time' value. Default is 200, so let's try bumping that up:

Code: Select all

printer.begin(250);
If that seems to be going in the wrong direction, can try a smaller value instead:

Code: Select all

printer.begin(150);
If this doesn't seem to be helping, or is working in the wrong direction, let's put it back at the default:

Code: Select all

printer.begin();
...and then need to try some changes in the library code itself (Adafruit_Thermal.cpp). Look for this block of code, around line 172:

Code: Select all

  writeBytes(27, 55);   // Esc 7 (print settings)
  writeBytes(20);       // Heating dots (20=balance of darkness vs no jams)
  writeBytes(heatTime); // Library default = 255 (max)
  writeBytes(250);      // Heat interval (500 uS = slower, but darker)
Let's adjust the 'heating dots' setting (20 by default). Try 10, save the file, re-upload the Arduino sketch. Any change? Or try the other direction, try 40. With some trial and error, you should be able to dial in a combination of heat time and dots that balances appearance and reliability.

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jimsen262
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by jimsen262 »

Hi, I've buy a raspberry pi with PITFT and MINI THERMAL Printer.

Now, I've success setup piTFT attached to my pi and work fine.

And now, how can I connect my printer into my pi ? Because the port already used by piTFT.

Please give me some advice step by step.

Thanks,
Jimmy Sentosa
order id : 736610-3329149380

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: mini Thermal printer defected

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Please stick to a single thread. There's a response over here: http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=72814

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