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A USB Typewriter?
jashmenn asks: "In my search for a furthering of the arts combined with technology I recently had the idea of hooking up an electronic typewriter to my USB port. The idea is to eventually write a script that would automatically send the text of emails to be typed on the typewriter. Does Slashdot have know of resources I can use for combining new and old school technologies such as these?"
depending on your ultimate goals (journey v. destination, etc), an impact printer might serve your needs.
Do you own a printer?
What purpose would this USB-Enabled Electronic Typewriter serve? Other than the "Just because I can, damnit!" I mean.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Why not just get a daisy wheel printer from the 80s and hook it up to a usb to parallel/serial adapter? IBM also made some printers with ball type print heads.
I've got an old electric typewriter that has a parallel port. It works just like a regular printer (text only). Seems like that's what you need. But if you're just doing this for fun, be my guest and hack up an USB connection yourself.
... you can use a printer - I hear they work quite well for hard-copy output of emails.
Have fun!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
connected to a serial->USB converter?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I suppose Dan Rather might be interested in one of these...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
We had a Brother daisy-wheel printer for our C=64 that had a keyboard attachment, allowing it to be used as a typewriter. You could probably hack something up with such a beast to do what you want since it was already half printer/half typewriter.
Lasers Controlled Games!
you've invented the "printer".
miracle of the modern age.
housewives can't live without it.
seriously, it will be a lot more impressive if you electrified one of those OLD manual typewriters. I have no idea how you might do that though.
unless your mp3 player has something called usb otg (on the go), you are SOL...usb is a server-host protocal, and i'm sure that both the camera and mp3 player are configured as hosts...
I remember in High School (1991) using typewriters that had a serial (maybe parallel) port on the back. you could hook them up to a PC and use it as an output device.
Try looking for typewriters like this, the work is already done for you.
If you're wanting an OLD 100% mechanical typewriter, ebay has those too. You'll need to create some USB trickery that accepts serial data and decodes it into individual characters. then sends a signal down a wire associated with the appropriate character, which you amplify and activate solonoids with. solonoids are about the only thing strong enough to fully stroke a mechanical typewriter key with any speed.
Disclaimer: I have no idea how you'd do this.
Geez, the collective Slashdot IQ is particularly low today. Let's see, so far I've seen people asking why bother, use a daisy-wheel printer, use a teletype, and plenty more of "why".
:)
For pete's sake, people, he said he was doing this for "art". I think he's probably already considered other printer options (daisy-wheel, teletype, etc.) and wants to have a typewriter, for the look of it.
At one point, I had an IBM Selectric typewriter that could also be driven by a parallel port (though the encoding was odd -- it might have been EBCDIC, come to think of it). That might fit the bill, though I've no idea where to find one. It'd certainly look cool. Be sure to send us a follow-up when you get this working.
Serious, either you have the ability to do this or you don't.
If you do have the ability to do this, then you will buy some USB interface chips, there are several on the market, choose one with a good development kit. (You might even be able to get a free sample). Google can help you choose too. Then you disassemble your typewriter and toss some glue electronics between the output of your USB chips and the keyboard. The rest is just software. Dig in and do it! Be prepared to fry some chips in the early process of course.
Of course if you don't have the ability, they you don't. Leave hacking to those interested in learning.
He/She wants to be able to create document forgeries and submit them to CBS via Outlook.
You might try the previously mentioned suggestions of using a Daisy wheel typewriter with a USB-Parallel adapter.
If you're looking for a more creative outlet, Si Labs sells a USB development board based on they're 8051 products. Either way, post the results here. There're a lot of people (like me) who like seeing old technologies adapted to the modern world.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Hack the typewriter, figure out how the signals work, wire them into a microcontroller (I recommend Microchip Inc's PIC line), connect the microcontroller to the USB port either using a USB UART or a USB->serial converter if you're lazy. Write some software. Done.
Some of the PICs have a builtin USB UART. The downside to this approach is you have to write a device driver on the computer end of things. On Linux you can hack up one of the drivers that comes with the kernel, on windows you'd have to use the MS driver development kit, there may be another way that I am not aware of. If you use a PIC or other microcontroller with an external USB->serial chip, it will appear as a USB serial port when you plug it in and normal serial port programing techniques will suffice.
If you really want to get fancy you should use the USB UART method and write a printer driver for it so you can print to it from any normal app. I have no idea how Linux printer drivers work though, in my experience they don't. work.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Heh. That's actually a really good idea, I looked it appears it hasn't been done. Granted, it is sorta silly, because why do you need USB (means you currently have a computer beside you) for a typewriter. But, that's a good idea n-t-l.
That's why I talked about hacking one of them.
I hate glomming onto another submitted story, but I have a similar need. I have a Brother word processor circa 1991 that I would love to be able to hook up to my serial port or something. I have a lot of text data that would be convenient to transfer over to my PC.
I understand there might be some difficulty interpreting the word processor code and file structures. It might even be nigh IMPOSSIBLE. Has anyone ever heard of any sort of interpreter for communication with a Brother word processor, or is that info stritclty porprietary and FORBIDDEN?
Even easier would be to somehow allow my PC to read the file structure for the floppies. Is there any info on the fundamentals of the Brother word processor's file structure floating around out there? Aren't there other people who have data on these things and would like it transferred to another format? I can't imagine this sort of thing has not been looked into yet.
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
http://www.buzbee.net/heavymetal/
Would do the job.. but unless you really NEED to use multipart carbon type forms.. why bother??
Sure ' just because i can' is Ok, but why not do something cool instead?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
First, traditional electric typewriters were mostly mechanical beasts (electric, not electronic) actauted by springs and levers with the user's finger motion enhanced by a flywheel. Only the flywheel was driven electrically, all the rest was mechanical. This means that there are no electical siganls generated when the user presses a key, just a series of levers and catches that connect the flywheel with a typearm and some mechanism to advance the carriage. Even the carriage return and platen advance was mechanical: as the carriage advanced a spring was stretched. The carriage return released the carriage, which was pulled rapidly to the right by the carriage return spring. When the carriage slams into the stop at the rightmost end of travel, a pin or wedge caused the platen to advance to the next line. The driving force for the platen advance was the momentum of the returning carriage.
In theory, you could instrument the typewriters mechanics with sensors to detect key presses and carriage return events using optical or electronic sensors. The sensor states would be fed into a microcontroller which would format them for communication over the USB port. This would allow you to use the typewriter as an input device.
Using the typewriter as an ouput device, however, is more complicated. You would actually have to add a bunch of actuators (solenoids, for example) to the typewriter's mechanism. I can think of a few ways to do this, but they are all labor intensive (I'd mount the solenoids vertically beneath the typewriter and connect each solenoid to the actual key it drives by a wire or shaft. When the soleniod is activated, the key is physically pulled down, just as if the key had been pressed normally.) and power hungry. Again, a microcontroller would be used to accept data from the USB port and translate it into signals to actuate the solenoids. The MCU would need to keep track of, or be able to sense, carriage position and put suitable delays between keystrokes to prevent jamming the device.
It all sound quite fascinating, but of very little practical value. It is likely to be a bit costly as well, but that shouldn't stop the dedicated hobbyist. Of course, for a lot less effort and money you may still be able to find an old ASR-33 teletype with an optional RS232 interface (most ASR-33's used current-loop interfaces, which are not directly compatible with RS232). These old teletypes are pretty much what you are looking for, ready-made. You may freely substitute a DECwriter for the ASR-33 and I think there may be some versions of the IBM selectric that also fit the bill.
Seriously though, wouldn't this be kinda cool for any old ASCII art someone might have? Old sigs on e-mails? Funky. Wish I had even an inkling of how to answer this question.
Do not touch -Willie
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I say we, but it was really my dad (an electronics technician) and my stepmom (a computer programmer) who did it. They took the TRS-80 parallel port output, which was a slow, simple 8 data lines and a clock, and connected it to an IBM Selectric.
The Selectric was already wired to accept electronic input, but not in ASCII. It expected tilt-and-rotate codes, which were directly transmitted to the golf ball shaped typing element. To translate the TRS-80's ASCII to tilt/rotate codes, my parents drew up a table of equivalents. Then, my dad came up with a way to logically combine the TRS-80's output with values stored in an EPROM to get the tilt/rotate codes.
I ended up using the computer for my typing class homework. Fortunately, the teacher didn't mind that I was writing BASIC programs like this:
10 A$ = "THE QUICK BROWN DOG ATE THE LAZY FOX"
20 FOR I% = 1 TO LEN(A$)
30 POKE addr, ASC(MID$(A$, I%, 1))
35 some sort of delay for the ball to get repositioned
40 NEXT
I thought I was getting away with something... but my teacher wisely realized that I was actually doing more typing by hacking around than I would have been if I'd used the actual typewriter.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Well, with a lot of help from my dad. Long time ago.
The machine was an IBM Selectric editing machine, designed to read paper tape and punch it. My dad wired amps to the paper tape reader so that the parallel port of a CP/M machine could drive it. I wrote the CP/M printer driver to convert ASCII to the codes the typewriter used. I think it was 5-bit, and there was a code for shift-up and another for shift-down, so the driver had to keep track of this state.
It printed quite beautifully, exactly like a typewriter. At the time everybody only had dot matrix, so reports and letters typed by this thing looked vastly superior.
It could also print proportional space (excellent for writing reviews of Bush's service records) but we did not have the printhead, which apparently turned this on.
Even if you don't find one with an adapter already installed, it'll still be easier to adapt, if only because:
1) You need far less solenoids since keystrokes get encoded for the ball mechanism, and
2) The solenoids can be weaker than they would need to be for most other types.
You'll have a hard time rigging solenoids to anything else, esp. a manual, which would require a more matched pull/push from each solenoid onto each lever or key, nevermind the room required.
The other thing to watch out for is the delay between keystrokes. I forget what the max. speed is on a Selectric, but the required pause between strokes wlill be higher on many typewiters, esp. manuals.
i.e. using a typewriter as a computer keyboard (which some responses discuss) has been done before, and discussed here.
The ElectriClerk is quite a sight BTW, and well worth looking at for inspiration with the current topic.
Way back, myself and an electronics engineer did this for a variety of _electronic_ typewriters, including IBM selectrics, olympia daisy wheel, etc. Each was different, all had gotcha's. We put a microcontroller (8751) between the keyboard connector, and the electronic board that drove the machine. That gave us control over what to print, and we could see what was typed. The machines being fairly mechanical meant that timing everything was complex, and exception ridden. Good luck!
Trouble, a mistake or fun, your choice
Is that you Dan Rather?
[Insert pithy quote here]
I was considering doing this with a vintage mechanical typewriter... woulda looked cool but it's a lot of work. Here's a website of a guy that's already done something like this with PS/2. It's pretty easy to convert ps/2 keyboards to usb. the typewriter-keyboard conversion [http://www.multipledigression.com/type/]
I'm reminded of Yogi Berra saying "it's like deja vu all over again."
Find an old teletype the does 8 bits and has a DB9 serial port.
Use a USB-Serial coverter.
Insert paper.
Type.
You must be young.
I must be old.
I had an Anderson-Jacobson hooked up up to a serial card in an Apple ][+ in the early '80's. Type on the AJ and it would come out on the printer and on the monitor (or just the paper, depending on how a switch was set). And depending on how another was set, type on the computer keyboard and it could come out on one or the other or both(screen, keyboard or both).
"Build your own TV Typewriter" paper back from Radio Shack 1978 vintage.
Or the better one was a magizine called Kilobaud, then became Microcomputer. They had plans for convertions.
There was a set of chips from National Semi that had ascii to row/column of selectic type writer.
Lastly the best I saw from late 70's early 80's was a device that had a push leaver over each key, and the output from the parallel port was used to translate which key(s) was(were) pressed. Typed very nicely.
After that build a USB/Parallel interface. Or even get USB/Motor Control interface so you use the CPU power to do the translation and punch the keys.
All in all, it will probably be much easier to get a robot arm with a USB interface and use that to drive the typewriter than it will be to actually convert the typewriter, unless you use one of the typewriters that already have this functionality (as mentioned in other posts.)
Not quite the original question, but I'm guessing you're looking for cool more than utility.
--Corprew
All work and no play makes jack a dull boy.
About a hundred years ago, using a TRS-80 and a model 28 teletype, I did this very thing. Well, I didn't know any better at the time. 5 level baudot code made a very interesting software project, in assembler at the time, for a Z-80. Was fun!