After figuring out the sizing/positioning for the bitmap images last week with the Arduino Uno, the my main focus for the beginning of this week was getting the Raspberry Pi to interface with the printer. I looked into ways to possibly connect the Arduino to the Raspberry Pi and have them work together in order to print the images. One method involved using the USB port on the Raspberry Pi to wire a connection to the Arduino. This method involves installing the Arduino IDE on the Rpi OS to use the printing functions provided by the Adafruit library. Using serial communication (UART), I was trying to find a way to have the Raspberry Pi and Arduino work together to print an image (i.e. rely on the Arduino to print the card design and have the Raspberry Pi take care of logic/communication to the other devices/server). I ended up not going with this method since our Raspberry Pi was model A, and only had one USB port- which was being used for the keyboard. The GPIO pins can also be used for UART as well, but at this point it was determined that this would just complicate the communication of the system.
For next week, I plan help with increasing the printing speed of the cards. The images are able to be printed with the Raspberry Pi, so working out the positioning to mimic the Arduino-printed cards we are using to train our model is something I plan to do.