This week I focused on getting the bitmaps to print on the thermal printer. We’ve been trying to finalize the designs for the cards to begin training for card recognition. Since we are using a Raspberry Pi to interface between all of our devices, I’ve been trying to make manual bitmaps/ASCII images to send to the printer. At the moment, the backup plan for using the Raspberry Pi is using ASCII images. Using the Raspberry Pi with the thermal printer has been pretty difficult, since there is little up-to-date documentation that allows us to send bitmaps with the two devices.
In the meantime, as another backup plan for demo, I’ve figured out how to configure an Arduino Uno to send bitmaps to our thermal printer. This took quite a bit of troubleshooting, since there were issues with library permissions and Arduino IDE not being compatible with my Mac OS, so I had to switch to using Windows. I was able to get faint images of a heart card suit printed, but it still needs some more fine tuning for the finalized designs.
Next week I hope to get more of the 52 card designs done, so training can start as soon as possible.