The Sinclair QL Forum

any for this?

Hi,

I was in the process of generating a schematic for the Miracle Centronics Adapter. Not quite finished.

I have converted some these adapters to work with the Retro-Printer interface for the Raspberry PI.

Retro-Printer is an interface to connect a Retro computer to a moden printer.

maybe pics of the board back forth??? hi ress?

Derek_Stewart wrote:I have converted some these adapters to work with the Retro-Printer interface for the Raspberry PI.

Wouldn't it make more sense to send the QL serial data directly to the Raspberry, instead of using the parallel port hat?

Hi,

I do not have a serial port on a Raspberry PI, but have a Retro_printer v3 module, which I connect the Miracle Centronics adpater v2 (v2 is the version shown in the picture), this allows printing to the printer defined in Raspberry PI CUPS printer server. In my case a Brother HL1230W and Canon Pixma MG2530 Ink jet printer.

The QL uses the Retro-Printer printer driver, and print out to the Brother Laser Printer perfectly.

I have also used the Miracle v1 Centeronics adapter, which is the interface with a lead at each end of the Miracle Interface,which works from SER1.

The Miracle v3 Centronics adpater which is a small adapter circuit board in the Centronics plug is unless tested at present.

I do not have schematics for the Miracle interface, but I have some files from ing, Louis Seidelmann for his new (2015) interface.
He has 4800 and 9600 baud version of this.
About the Sandy interface (probably confused with Miracle?) he said, that it uses clever solution "using shift register and two timers".

Derek_Stewart wrote:I do not have a serial port on a Raspberry PI, but have a Retro_printer v3 module, which I connect the Miracle Centronics adpater v2 (v2 is the version shown in the picture), this allows printing to the printer defined in Raspberry PI CUPS printer server.

What do you mean by not having a serial port? Every Raspberry has a serial port!

Why not feed it from the QL? I really don't see why to convert the QL printer stream from serial to parallel, and then from parallel to Raspberry. Two converters while just an RS-232 driver is needed.

Derek Stewart wrote:
I do not have a serial port on a Raspberry PI, but have a Retro_printer v3 module, which I connect the Miracle Centronics adpater v2 (v2 is the version shown in the picture), this allows printing to the printer defined in Raspberry PI CUPS printer server.

Peter wrote:
What do you mean by not having a serial port? Every Raspberry has a serial port!

Why not feed it from the QL? I really don't see why to convert the QL printer stream from serial to parallel, and then from parallel to Raspberry. Two converters while just an RS-232 driver is needed.

The serial port on a RPi is by default assigned to the console but this is easily changed using the raspi-config program to either a serial port on a serial hat or one of the USB ports. Once this is done and CUPs is set up a bit of python code will capture files from the QL serial connection and call CUPs to print them out in my case via Wifi to my Wifi/USB printer, no need for centronics interfaces. CUPS natively understands plain text,html and postscript. It also has 3 basic fonts built in, Times, Helvetica and Courier. Marcel Kilgus' MPS.bas program can provide a basis for filters on the QL side to use the different fonts via postscript or to convert Quill docs to post script for printing. via Wifi.

Cheers

Plain text, HTML and Postscript is probably not what Derek wanted.
But there is a Raspberry open source project for converting Epson ESC/P and ESC/P2 dot matrix and inkjet printer data, too. Which is, as far as I know, the basis of the Retro-Printer Derek mentioned.

Peter wrote:
But there is a Raspberry open source project for converting Epson ESC/P and ESC/P2 dot matrix and inkjet printer data, too. Which is, as far as I know, the basis of the Retro-Printer Derek mentioned.

True enough. This is a hardware based project aimed at all sorts of settings including industrial, costs £55 a pop, and takes ESC/P ESC/P2 and PCL format data files and converts them to pdf for printing via CUPs - far more complicated than a simple bit of software for converting to postscript. If pdf was a required output rather than simply printing to a modern printer this could be achieved by coverting .ps files to pdf with Ghostscript.

Cheers