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If you want to do as little software development, you'll want the "A2" thermal printer that has appeared in a bunch of electronics shops lately:
- Sparkfun
- Adafruit (Adafruit also sell a starter pack which includes a US power supply and some paper)
- Proto-PIC
- Cool Components
You should expect to pay around $50 or £35 for this printer. You can also buy the Adafruit IoT printer kit and adapt the Arduino sketch to run quite happily on it.
If you already have a thermal printer of a different kind, and are happy write a Print Processor class for the server (be sure to submit a pull request!), you can just use that.
I have run the sketch against an Arduino Uno + Ethernet Shield, and an Arduino Ethernet.
- Sparkfun Arduino + Shield
- Adafruit Arduino + Shield
- Cool Components Arduino + Shield
- Oomlout Arduino + Shield
- Proto-PIC Arduino + Shield
- RS Components Arduino + Shield
This costs around $30 or £20 for the most recent Uno, and $45 or £35 for the ethernet shield. For both, thats $75 or £55 in total.
Make sure you get an Ethernet shield that has an SD card slot, as we'll need to use that as temporary storage. RS Components seem to have the best prices at the moment - £17 for the Arduino, and £25 for the shield.
Arduino also make a combined Ardunio + Ethernet + SD card board, which is more compact than the Arduino + Shield open, and also slightly cheaper.
This board should cost around $65 or £42 (though RS seem to have it for £32 at the moment).
There's no reason why you can't use a different controller board, such as the Nanode, a Raspberry Pi, or whatever else you have to hand, as long as you're able to write some software that downloads a file from a server via HTTP, and then spits it out to your printer.
So for the printer and the Arduino, you're looking at a base cost of around $115 or £70. Buying in bulk can reduce this slightly, but not by very much.
You can power an Arduino via USB, but that won't provide enough current for the printer when it's actually printing, so you will need an external power adapter. I've had success using 5v and 9v AD adapters that output 1500mA to 2500mA.
If you bought the Adafruit printer starter or IoT printer kits, you'll already have a suitable power supply, but if you need to get one, here are a few options:
You shouldn't expect to pay more than $10 or £10 for this.
The building instructions requires a handful of LEDs, resistors and wires. If you've done some tinkering with Arduinos before, chances are that you already have these lying around, but if not you can pick them up very cheaply at almost every electronic store. Unfortunately you can't really buy just 3 LEDs or 1 button, so