An elegant and efficient Arduino library for controlling thermal printers (POS) that got a parallel or a Centronix port. The library is based on the Adafruit serial thermal printer library.

The Serial_printer example sketch lets you print text from the serial monitor. Note that you need a "real" serial terminal program that supports that supports sending ASCII control characters such as Ctrl + B, Ctrl + U and Ctrl + X in order to bold, underline and cut the paper. Recommended Serial terminals are Tera Term (Windows) and CoolTerm (Mac).

Any Arduino compatible microcontroller with hardware serial and at least 11 IO pins.

Click on the "Download ZIP" button. Exctract the ZIP file, and move the extracted folder to the location "~/Documents/Arduino/libraries". Create the "libraries" folder if it doesn't exist. Open Arduino IDE, and a new library called "Parallel Thermal printer" will show up under the "examples" menu.

Use this constructor if you're using a single physical port for your parallel data bits (AVR microcontrollers only):

Printer Thermal(&PORTC, strobePin, busyPin, selectPin);

// Identical:
Printer Thermal(&PORTC, strobePin, busyPin, selectPin, MSBFIRST);

If the data bits are flipped:

Printer Thermal(&PORTC, strobePin, busyPin, selectPin, LSBFIRST);

Use this constructor if you're using separate pins for your parallel data bits (All arduino compatible microcontrollers):

Printer Thermal(/*bit 7*/ dataPin7, /*bit 6*/ dataPin6, /*bit 5*/ dataPin5, /*bit 4*/ dataPin4, /*bit 3*/ dataPin3, /*bit 2*/ dataPin2, /*bit 1*/ dataPin1, /*bit 0*/ dataPin0, strobePin, busyPin, selectPin);
// Identical
Printer Thermal(/*bit 7*/ dataPin7, /*bit 6*/ dataPin6, /*bit 5*/ dataPin5, /*bit 4*/ dataPin4, /*bit 3*/ dataPin3, /*bit 2*/ dataPin2, /*bit 1*/ dataPin1, /*bit 0*/ dataPin0, strobePin, busyPin, selectPin, MSBFIRST);

If the data bits are flipped:

Printer Thermal(/*bit 0*/ dataPin0, /*bit 1*/ dataPin1, /*bit 2*/ dataPin2, /*bit 3*/ dataPin3, /*bit 4*/ dataPin4, /*bit 5*/ dataPin5, /*bit 6*/ dataPin6, /*bit 7*/ dataPin7, strobePin, busyPin, selectPin, LSBFIRST);