Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Reddit Shower Thoughts Printer”.
This week we’re going to build something totally useless. It’S a ridiculous desk toy that prints out snippets from reddit’s famous shower thoughts. This project combines an arduino mega, an esp8266 module, a thermal printer and a plastic mannequin head to build the circuit and structure for it to live in. You’Ll need to do a little bit of soldering and use a rotary tool to cut holes into the mannequin head. Drill a hole in the back of the mannequin for the power jack and one at the front for the push button mark out a hole in the side of the head for the printer and then cut it out with a cut-off wheel of your rotary tool. Check. The fitment of the printer and make any changes necessary to ensure a good fit power comes from the 9-volt jack in the back of the mannequin head and travels down the left power rails of the perf board, the small red logic, level, converter, bridges, the two halves Of the perf board separately, managing 5 volts on the left supplied by the arduino and 3.3 on the right for the esp8266, wi-fi board place a 1k resistor on the board, as shown running from lv on the logic level converter board to a free row that will Connect to the esp8266 in the next step.
The esp8266 runs its default firmware in this project, so there is no need to reprogram it. You will need to wire it. However, using jumpers connect the pins of the esp8266 to the logic level converter, using this on-screen guide to get the esp8266 and the arduino mega talking to each other connect hv1 from the logic level converter to tx1 on the arduino and hv2 to rx1. The momentary push button is used to generate new thoughts to be printed connect. One of the two leads from your push button to d7 on the arduino connect the other lead to any ground, while you’re at it be sure to also ground the arduino by running any of its ground, pins to a ground rail on the perf board to wire The thermal printer serial connection run its yellow cable to d6 on the arduino and green to d5 power. The printer by running its red and black wires to the nine volt power and ground rails on the perf board, use a wire splice to extend these wires.
If you need more slack now we’ll program, the arduino load up the sketch provided in the description below and make sure to update it with your wifi network details, you’ll also likely need to add the adafruit thermal printer libraries before uploading the code. At this point, the build should be functionally complete, connect the power and push the button. A shower thought should be randomly pulled from the internet and printed out on the thermal printer.
If everything works stuff everything into the mannequin head and set it at your desk or anywhere, you want to display it. So this project doesn’t have a ton of utility, but it is fun and it’s packed with functional code. That with a few tweaks could be made really useful. You could print out things like to-do lists, your calendar events or any other sort of information that you find useful on a daily basis. If you can think of any other cool applications, be sure to.
Let us know in the comments speaking of comments, i wanted to take a moment to share one of my favorite ones. From our last weekend project the clodney plate user forensic one man has actually used the same clodney visualization concept for over 20 years. When he’s tuning the tops of his handmade acoustic guitars, that’s really cool. I didn’t realize this technique was still used and still had a practical application.
Alright, that’s it for this week, we’ll see you in the next weekend project. If you liked this video subscribe to our website or send us a comment on facebook or twitter be sure to check out our other project videos or visit us on makezine.com, you .