bleprinter 0.2.0

A library for writing text to BLE receipt printers

BLEPrinter

BLEPrinter is a library for working with "cat printers," a sort of cheap receipt printer which communicates using an undocumented protocol over Bluetooth Low Energy. Unlike similar programs, BLEPrinter is:

1. Text-oriented, and
2. Meant to be used in other projects.

It achieves the former by taking in formatted text, rendering those inputs an as image, before sending the result over the wire.

Due to the obfuscated nature of the printers, my own limited access to the hardware, and a principled allocation of resources, this code has not been verified to work with all similar devices in every situation. BLEPrinter strives to be robust and sensical, well typed and formatted, not necessarily to handle every edge case.

Where improvements are to be made—I would be thrilled to hear from you and accept your contributions. In particular, weaving in support for images and other content types (such as barcodes or QR codes) would be first on the hypothetical project roadmap.

Documentation and Usage

import asyncio
from bleprinter import Printer

def main():
  p = Printer()
  p.textln("Hello World!", size=4, bold=True, centered=True)
  p.textln("from figbert", size=2, centered=True)

  p.textln("Neat Heading", underline=True)
  p.textln("Fin.")

  asyncio.run(p.cut())

Dependencies

• bleak
• opencv-python

References

• catprinter
• python-escpos