IoT Memo Printer

Communicate with your long-distance loved ones in an old-fashioned way.

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Inspiration

Whether for study or work, more and more people leave their hometown and rely on phones to communicate with their parents, friends or lover. However, compared with the paper letters, this electronic messages seem less "warm". We are trying to combine the advantages of paper and letters and electronic messages to create a new way for people to express their love remotely.

What it does

You can write a letter and share the photo you take to your loves through MQTT net, and once people set before the printer, it will print what you send through website. The printer could print things locally and remotely and it can also detect the local temperature of humidity.

How we built it

  1. Fill the BOM and draw related schematic through Altium.
  2. Design the related Power Supply Circuit.
  3. Draw the PCB through Altium.
  4. Write CLI, FreeRTOS driver and OTAFU(Bootloader) to SAMW25
  5. Design Node-Red schematic.
  6. Write I2C, USART, DS-100, SHTC3, Thermal Printer driver. ## Challenges we ran into
  7. The Thermal Printer we used only has library for Arduino, we need to convert it to C and make it fit into ATSAM. What's worse, there is even no datasheet for this printer :(
  8. The TFT touch screen we used communicate in SPI and there are few driver sources, we didn't finish it yet..... ## Accomplishments that we're proud of We managed to port the Arduino library for thermal printer into SAM platform under ASF! Although not all the original functions are available now, we will keep improving it! ## What we learned The most valuable thing we learnt is an entire production process of an IoT Product. Learning to draw the schematic and design PCB, learn to use FreeRTOS and Node-Red(MQTT) and write Bootloader. All of these is very helpful when we work as an IoT engineer. We also linked the hardware and software knowledge together to design a product. One more thing we need to pay attention to is the practicability of the product, like checking the components we need in the market and make sure it is available. In conclusion, this course let us get prepared to be an engineer in industrial·. ## What's next for the IoT Memo Printer We are try to write the SPI driver and printer's driver by ourselves this summer. Once we finished, the product gonna has a 2.4-inch touchscreen for users to write down texts like writing a letter or to draw a picture. The further version may even add the handwriting recognition (we may use DL to analyze it in cloud).

Built With

  • asf
  • c
  • freertos
  • mqtt
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