Thermal printer reference design

Thermal printers are quite common due to their wide-spread use in so many devices in our day-to-day life. Some of them are handheld devices used for point-of-sales, ticketing machines, metering, and so forth. The benefits of thermal printers are compelling. There is no toner, ink or ribbons required for a thermal printer. A thermal receipt printer uses a printhead with few moving parts and it fits in a thin space about three inches across. By contrast, the standard receipt printer is composed of about 20 moving parts and electrical devices, and takes up at least twice the space. Nowadays, thermal printer mechanisms are even available with an integrated electro-mechanical paper cutter in it. All of these features make thermal printers a right choice in a wide variety of applications.

This application report discusses the complete hardware and software required for a thermal printer solution based on Texas Instruments Tiva controllers. Tiva controllers are 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 80- MHz processor core with IEEE754-compliant single-precision Floating-Point Unit (FPU), on-chip memory, featuring 256 KB single-cycle Flash, 32 KB single-cycle SRAM; internal ROM loaded with TivaWare for C Series software; 2KB EEPROM and several other features.

View the PDF document for more information.

Originally published by Texas Instruments Inc. at www.ti.com as "Thermal Printer Reference Design Using TM4C1233H6PM".