Adafruit Thermal Printer

This printer prints simple strings passed to it via TTL serial (printing an array of chars one at a time), bitmap images (poorly) and it even generates several different formats of barcodes. The thermal printer takes 2.25" (57mm) wide thermal paper with a max roll diameter of 1.5" (39mm). You don’t need to have a ‘core’ in the paper for it to work. The back panel has one 5-pin connector. The nano thermal printer ships with a 9600 bps baud rate. You’re going to need to connect it to an external power supply, as the printer will draw more current than USB is capable of delivering. We’ve found that these printers can draw about 1.5A because they need to generate heat (a 5V 2A barrel adapter was used for external power). Also the nano thermal printer has a line on the 5-pin connector for DTR that is not used.

Here is a nice picture of the printer hooked up to the mbed serial pins (p9 and p10) and the printer is powered externally.

Here is a video of the printer in action.