Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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...
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
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.
Sometimes its just fun, or for learning purposes. I'm currently trying to make a home security system that is run by the computer. I've wanted to learn electronics for a while so I went and spent about $15 on some basic parts (door sensor,DB15 to RJ45, wire) and have a linux box now recognizing if a door is open or closed. For some people that may not mean much, but this is the first time I've made a computer interact with the real world. I'm having a blast doing it, and I'm not spending $100s on an alarm that I don't really need, or buying off the shelf equipment that wouldn't help me learn anything.
That would be pretty bitchin' if you hooked it up to a tiny wireless print server, cleverly hidden and attached underneath a table!
:)
I'd like my $1 million in Ben Franklins, Mr. Randi, thank you
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
For your next project: Connect a thermistor or other temperature sensor to a port (a joystick port is good). Then when the door is open, check the temp outside. If it's less than n, have a text-to-speech program shout "Hey! Close the door! Do you think we're made of money or something?"
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I like that idea :). First I'm more interested in motion sensors or IR beams after I'm satisfied with the way the door sensors are working. A couple of other things I'd like to add are smoke detectors and water sensors (especially in the water softner which decided to overflow a few weeks ago). I'm currently using the gameport (took longer to get Linux to recgonize the gameport than it did to get the door sensor wired to the gameport). I'm currently using the analog driver which gives me only 4 buttons and up to 4 axis to play with. Depending how exact I can get with the axis, it allows for quite a few inputs, but I think eventually I'll look to going to a USB driven setup.
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.
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.
First, attach your household power source to the chassis...
True story - when I applied for renter's insurance, my insurance company told me that a 'bunch of cans on a string' counts as an alarm system, and that if it is loud enough to be heard by the neighbors, it can be considered 'monitored'.
I suppose it depends on your insurer, but I would think that level of sophistication you have would be a pretty safe bet to meet the criteria.
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.
You should get a microcontroller. Those suckers are tiny microprocessors with boatload of I/O. Most have some sort of A/D, too.
You can program the microcontroller to read off all of its input port, and dump the data to a serial port. Then, you just have to make Linux open up a serial port and watch the data pour in.
You could also use the microcontroller to drive things, too. Have the PC send serial data, and the microcontroller acts on it.
Microchip makes some ones that are good for beginners, just add assembly or C. Parallax makes some that are programmed in BASIC. Fun stuff!
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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.
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
Circuit Cellar magazine is probably a good place to start for projects and ideas. Over the years, they've had quite a number of projects in that area ranging from the simple to the complex, and they probably have archive CDs fairly cheap.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Wups! Who put that extra dot there?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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