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Comment by kaishiro | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have a good recommendation for a thermal printer? I've been looking to get one for printing out daily to-dos and shopping lists.

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There are a ton of brands and I got a random knock off so I can only report on that one. I would recommend putting some thought and research into what size you think you'll need. I got a 58mm printer and I'm realizing it's quite narrow.

Also you might want to consider the size of the printer itself. I bought a open-box new printer off ebay and the seller's photos didn't give any sense of scale. I was surprised how big this "mini" printer is. It's about the standard size of a printer you'd see at a grocery store, so I don't think I'll be keeping it on my desk.

In the US my impression is that printers marketed with a size in inches are quality printers from reputable brands but bottom feeding Chinese printers are marketed with a size in mm.

I have a PeriPage A6 Mini Bluetooth Portable Thermal Printer (https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-2-a6-mini-p...), the 304dpi option.

There are many similar models from other companies; however, while Bluetooth is advertised as its primary connection, this one also has a USB port, which works with Linux!

Bluetooth also works, but it was too unreliable for me. I ended up using Claude to write a small CLI tool which prints via raw USB: rock solid and simple.

I'd very much recommend a second-hand Epson TM-M30 if you can pick one up for cheap. It prints at 203dpi and can output true grayscale (multi tone) without dithering.

I have one of those AliExpress ones that look like a white box with a colored circle on one side, stylized to look like a cat. They go for a few bucks used in the secondary market. I wrote a simple webapp for it to avoid using the bulky official app, it uses the web Bluetooth API (Chrome only sadly): https://purrint.github.io/

What did you use to reverse engineer the BLE protocol?

Some people already did that, there were bits of Python and Processing code lying on GitHub I found by searching the Bluetooth device name. I just had to convert that to use web Bluetooth API and build the app around that.

I got the Phomemo M02 Pro and have liked it alright for printing out playtest cards on-the-fly. Claude did manage to replicate an integration someone else did the hard work of working out w/ dithering etc, but the native app's fidelity & speed has been better for my use-case, at least

For daily to-dos a generic 58mm Chinese ones is probably enough. For pen and paper stuff I highly recommend going with anything 80mm, as 58mm can be too narrow...

Search "58mm usb thermal receipt printer esc/pos" on Amazon and you will find various generic models

Seeed studio has a module if you want to make your own - https://www.seeedstudio.com/Embedded-Thermal-Printer-p-1621....

I like my rollo (and i only print standard sticker sizes) but any of the cheap clones will pretty much be equivalent and just as bulletproof.

Epsons tend to take logical instructions and have linux driver support. They also last forever.

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