Use 82240B as computer printer

[R. Pienne]

I have a HP 82240B printer, which I had been planning to use with my now-dumped HP 49g+, but I now have no IR-equipped calc to use it with, and am wondering about using it as a general-purpose printer for my PCs (both running Debian GNU+Linux). I reckon what I would need would be a USB IR transmitter (I've seen http://www.home-electro.com/tira2.php, http://www.usbuirt.com, http://iguanaworks.net/products/usb-ir-transceiver/, but maybe there is better), driver software such as "lirc", and to write some software to make it send the right codes to the printer (ignoring CUPS). I have the 82240B "technical interfacing guide".

So, does anybody here have experience of this sort of thing, and have any advice to offer?

Thanks a lot.

Edited: 7 Dec 2013, 11:30 a.m.

[Katie Wasserman]

I haven't tried driving an IR LED from a PC, but have programmed a microcontroller to drive the 82240A/B. The "technical interfacing guide" was excellent in providing all the details needed to do this. The timing is pretty critical but I found that the manual is quite conservative and that wider tolerances are actually used. In any case using a microcontroller to actually drive the IR LED is the way to go since they make it easy to get the timing just right.

I described this project in some detail near the bottom of this totally unrelated thread. Note that in this case I could have used an IR LED, but since I embedded this inside the printer I didn't have to.

It would be simple to modify this microcontroller to read serial data over a USB port and output it to an IR LED. However, it doesn't make use of the graphics ability of the printer so it would need some enhancement for that.

-katie

Edited: 7 Dec 2013, 11:58 a.m.

[R. Pienne]

OK, thanks a lot. I have no experience of microcontrollers, so I'll probably have to stick to off-the-shelf solutions. Might just go for whichever transmitter seems the best and see what I can do with it. :-)

[Marcus von Cube, Germany]

May I suggestiv the WP 34S?