What number of occasions have you ever discovered your self pining for an previous influence printer, like a daisy wheel, solely to comprehend that you don’t have anything however an electromechanical typewriter at your disposal? In case you occur to be Konstantin Schauwecker, this can be a day by day prevalence. The thought has most likely by no means even occurred to people who will not be fully obsessive about typewriters, however on seeing Schauwecker’s creation they might develop a newfound appreciation for all issues typewriter.
Schauwecker has made one thing that may be a very unusual sight within the age of inkjet and laser printers — an electromechanical typewriter that, beneath the management of a pc, acts like an influence printer. This may occasionally sound unusual to the fashionable ear, however computer-controllable variations of electrical typewriters, just like the IBM Selectric-based printers, have been widespread within the Sixties by way of the early Eighties. They primarily substitute key presses with electrical indicators from a pc, which in flip causes the typewriter to print characters on paper.
That’s the excellent technique to do it, anyway. However issues have been nowhere close to excellent for Schauwecker. He had a typewriter at his disposal that was by no means meant for this objective. It had solely a single motor that, when a key was pressed, triggered a posh mechanism (that Schauwecker couldn’t totally perceive) that brought on the character to be printed. With out a person swap for every key, the one cheap path ahead appeared to be to really bodily press every key, then let the mysterious mechanism do its magic.
The answer is extraordinarily clunky, to place it flippantly. Schauwecker put a set of fifty solenoids right into a 3D-printed body stiffened with aluminum. The solenoids are aligned with the keys, and when triggered, they bodily press them. Every solenoid is triggered by a circuit consisting of a matrix of transistors and supporting parts. The GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi ship a sign to find out when a specific solenoid ought to be activated.
To print a doc, it’s first transformed to a PDF. A background course of then picks up new PDFs and makes use of an software that converts them into textual content in a manner that preserves spacing and different format parts. The Raspberry Pi then prints these characters by activating the right solenoids.
Whereas the big, advanced printing mechanism smacks of overengineering, it additionally appears surprisingly applicable for the aim. Sadly, it’s not fully dependable, nonetheless. Schauwecker famous that when a sure key, like house, must be repeated many occasions, key presses are often missed. Regardless of his greatest efforts to repair the issue, it nonetheless occurs. He believes it might really be a difficulty with the typewriter itself, so it is probably not fixable.
Schauwecker additionally experimented with creating graphics by backspacing and typing a number of characters over the identical place. This could be a really cool trick, nonetheless, the reliability points made it unimaginable to get a great outcome. Oh properly, there’s at all times ASCII artwork !
This undertaking positively falls into the “simply because I can” class. It isn’t helpful nowadays, however it’s enjoyable to look at it work. You don’t want to overlook this video.
This typewriter-printer mixture is powered by a Raspberry Pi (📷: Konstantin Schauwecker)
A row of solenoids (📷: Konstantin Schauwecker)
One other have a look at the {hardware} (📷: Konstantin Schauwecker)
