This Printer Spits Out a Constant Stream of News From the BBC's RSS Service
Even though the RSS feed is past its prime, this printer-based project aims to bring it back in a more physical way.
The idea
Printers are often forgotten technologies when it comes to the realm of retro technology, as gaming and vintage computing systems seem to get most of the attention. To help remedy this, Jan Derogee wanted to create a fun, yet interesting, project that could make excellent use of his old Brother HR-5C printer. After thinking of several ideas, he ultimately settled on one that would evoke the same kinds of feelings that newsrooms used to have- namely, the constant noises and output of the latest headlines from around the world. To accomplish this task, Derogee decided to use an ESP8266 that would fetch information from an RSS feed and then send it to the printer.
An overview of the RSS feed
The acronym "RSS" stands for "really simple syndication", and it allows for simple text information to be sent over the internet in short intervals. The data itself is merely an XML file that contains three main parts/tags: the title, a description (can be thought of as the body of the message), and the publication date in the form of a timestamp. Because many RSS sources publish files that regularly exceed hundreds of kilobytes in size, Derogee had to ensure that his program would only buffer the necessary data, as the ESP8266 has a limited amount of memory.
Getting the news
Before starting work on his program, Derogee first created a simple board by soldering together an ESP8266 module along with a power input, voltage regulator, and serial connector for attaching the printer. In this case, the printer houses a six-pin DIN plug that implements the Commodore IEC serial protocol. Even better, the slow nature of the interface means the program does not have to be as concerned with outputting data at a high speed.
How to output information
The last part of this project was getting the incoming data from the RSS feed to be seen coming out of the printer. Once the XML has been parsed and stored within a buffer, it's then printed one line at a time using a custom driver. To read more about this project, you can visit Derogee's blog post here, or you can view the code and design files here on GitHub.