afthermal¶
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.