afthermal 0.3.1

Note

afthermal is currently in alpha status. This is a snapshot release of the development branch. While it is used productively, some features may be unfinished or undocumented.

afthermal is a driver/library for the popular Adafruit (originally Cashino A2) thermal printer [1].

Partially, it is inspired by previous efforts:

• https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Thermal-Printer-Library
• https://github.com/adafruit/Python-Thermal-Printer/
• https://github.com/luopio/py-thermal-printer/

afthermal try to be more pythonic and efficient than previous efforts, which have mostly been 1:1 ports from other languages. Additionally it is not focused on education but rather on being a reliable library for handling this kind of hardware.

Features include:

• Comfortable handling of text formatting
• Adapters to print images from PIL / Pillow as well as OpenCV
• A fast Floyd-Steinberg implementation to dither OpenCV images.
• Command-line utilities for calibrating the printer for optimum speed and quality, as well as other capabilities
• Support for printing QR codes via PyQRCode without having to render them into images first

[1]	Specification is available at http://www.adafruit.com/datasheets/CSN-A2%20User%20Manual.pdf

Installation

afthermal is installable from pip. It supports an extra feature named tools, installing it will include cli tools for calibrating the printer, printing test images or other tasks:

$ pip install 'afthermal[tools]'

It includes a C extension for Floyd-Steinberg dithering, since OpenCV does not ship with a dithering function. For this reason C-modules must be compileable when installing afthermal.

Full docs

The complete documentation is housed at http://pythonhosted.org/afthermal.