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For daily to-dos a generic 58mm Chinese ones is probably enough. For pen and paper stuff I highly recommend going with anything 80mm, as 58mm can be too narrow...
Search "58mm usb thermal receipt printer esc/pos" on Amazon and you will find various generic models
Thanks for posting my project! was wondering where the influx of GitHub stars came from :)
That's the approach I used for my thermal printer based project. Render HTML/CSS to B/W Image and then print it on the thermal printer.
Cool to see core war! I feel it's mostly forgotten by now. My dad is still playing it to this day though and even attends tournaments
Isn't your problem more about Color quantization than about dithering? If you have big character cells like in a terminal dithering won't help you much. For each cell you want to find the best shaped cell and a foreground and background colour that are the closest to a colour from the supported palette.
But maybe I didn't understand your real problem yet
Sorry for the confusion. The use-case is a little difference because the goal is to display the image as close to the original as possible with the limitation of only being able to use a forground color, background color and character per cell. The character is selected based on it's shape just like in the article. So if you get rid of the colors in Chafa you end up with something similar to the article. That's what I wanted to say :D
In the "Image to Terminal character" space this is also a known solution. Map characters to their shape and then pick the one with the lowest diff to the real chunk in the image. If you consider that you have a foreground and a background colour you can get a pretty close image in the terminal :D
My go version: https://github.com/BigJk/imeji
"90s black metal Pokémon" aka a first person roguelike dungeon crawler with monster collection elements. C++ with no engine :)
Thank you for posting my project :D
You can often times find them for really cheap on the secondary market. Like old ones from a restaurant. I got quite a few for very cheap over the years. One was 20$ for a 80mm one.
So maybe that's a low budget option to tinker for you? Or is the problem buying one at all?
Always happy to see other thermal printer projects :D
I have my own project for using these for TTRPGs: https://sales-and-dungeons.app/
Always stand up at 07:00 am. Take supplements against my migrains with a good amount of tap water. Eat the same oatmeal with some cacao powder and oat milk just to get some food in my system. Then I do about 45 - 60 min of Japanese language reviews. At 08:00 I sit down in my work area and start working. No coffee/caffeine.
This is how 90% of my workdays go for the last 1.5 years :)
That looks like a fun project to build!
I switched from Goland to Zed. Works really well. Only missing debugger support... After that it would be perfect for my usage :)
I tried to use zeds SSH remoting for a work project. Typescript with big codebase and sadly the performance is a rollercoaster. Types sometimes load so slow that it's unusable. VSCode remote doesn't seem to have this problem, although I'm not sure yet if it's really just a zed problem. I would need to try it with some more isolated use-case. Still happy to see the progress! I switched to zed for a lot of my private dev work already
Thanks a lot! Thermal printer as DIY thingy are quite a niche, but they are very fun to play around with
The same project I'm working on since about 5 years. Using thermal printer as TTRPG utility :)
I use Thermal Printer for a different use-case (TTRPG stuff). Feel free to check it out :)
Thermal Printer as D&D / TTRPG utility: https://github.com/BigJk/snd
This! Most of my creativity in private projects stems from having build a broad space of knowledge/experiences. Having tinkered with a lot of different disconnected things really helps me find interesting bits to combine in a new and creative way that I never had imagined before :)
Bubbletea is great and fun to work with. Even building a terminal game with it since a while :)
A "slay the spire"-like deck builder game that can run in the terminal, but with full mouse support + images: https://github.com/BigJk/end_of_eden
And my long-time project. A Dungeons & Dragons utility to use Thermal Printer for handy Printouts: https://github.com/BigJk/snd
Literally the same for me. Both the object + relation part and the 3D construction.
I can't see anything in my mind yet I can construct the full geometry of my living room very detailed just from memory or can easily trace a route between locations I know, even if I didn't visit them a lot. It's like being a 3D printing nozzle and being able to trace whatever I need in my head without seeing.
That's probably the reason why I really like digital/web design and CAD because the length and geometry is very well defined based on basic shapes. It's like the visualization of what I would do in my brain?
Corewars is great and was my first contact with programming when I was a child, as my father was (and still is) a very active member of its small community. I also won two youth computer science contests with a topic about corewar. It's very dear to my heart and probably what ignited my love for programming overall and changed the course of my whole life :)
Since a few years I'm developing a free and open source tool for D&D and TTRPGs in general, that let's you design handy printouts to print on thermal printers.
Thermal printers are small in size and the format is perfect for quick printouts :) (and it's just fun)
The tool is called Sales & Dungeons: https://github.com/BigJk/snd
Tasty name! Great work :) I'm sure that was a lot of fun to build
If you use a more modern terminal you can also use stuff like:
What a coincidence! In case you are also using discord there is a lonely server linked in the README. Feel free to hop in and don't worry about time. There are no strings attached. I'm in no rush and this is a fun-first project :)
Thanks for the kind words :) It's currently in a bit of a hiatus. While the games "engine" is in a workable state it lacks content. Unfortunately I like building systems far more than actually creating game content. Might need to find a few people that are interested in helping with that at some point
I wrote a small terminal emulator a while ago to have a portable terminal for my terminal based game. It's very specific but I had great fun with it.