literally title. I wanna stream on twitch and make it so people can like send in donation messages and images so they can get printed off of one of these bad boys. I have next to experience with coding or any kind of actual skills that could actually help me with this, but I have an end goal, so thats a start I guess. Idk how many of these printers operate off of really proprietary code where you can only use an official app or some shit for it, or if some of them just let you feed some kind of image into it to get printed, but I feel like it has to be possible somehow, right? Even if it is a really hacky solution. Idk, if any of you tech nerds on here have any advice for me i will love you forever but i'm betting on my dream just being automatically crushed cuz whoever manufactures these probably doesn't want people to have fun.
Most of those printers simply use a serial or COM port interface that you can send ESC/POS formatted ASCII text to, no proprietary software needed. In fact most use the same standard USB connector as inkjet/laserjet printers. You can easily do this with the printer, python, pyserial, and whatever API your streaming platform provides.
thank you for the reply, do you know if theres any kind of way to put like a png on them?
I am no coder myself, but you may actually have better luck deploying a custom solution with a kit like this https://learn.adafruit.com/mini-thermal-receipt-printer rather than a locked-down, proprietary printer. Adafruit's hardware kit seems decidedly less expensive, too
from what I know, doing that will require proprietary utility software made by the manufacturer to program a "logo" into the printer's memory, but it is usually free. you just have to look up what you need to download and how to use it on the manufacturers website/manuals. once it is set, you send an ESC/POS command to print the specified logo through the serial interface.
some thermal printers have ESC/POS commands to print arbitrary images sent over serial, but it will be more complicated, as you have to write some code to process the image into a format that the printer can use, so I recommend the preset logo method, though making it print arbitrary images can be a fun side project to work on after the core functionality is done.