A USB Typewriter? 79
jashmenn asks: "In my search for a furthering of the arts combined with technology I recently had the idea of hooking up an electronic typewriter to my USB port. The idea is to eventually write a script that would automatically send the text of emails to be typed on the typewriter. Does Slashdot have know of resources I can use for combining new and old school technologies such as these?"
Re:Daisy Wheel (Score:2, Interesting)
However it only had a 9 pin connector on the back. I think it was serial, but non-standard and no documentation. I didn't have time to fiddle with it at the time, and it either got lost during a move or buried under a whole pile of stuff. ("Some of our top men are working on it" buried.)
I guess I own Schrodinger's typewriter.
Allow me to glom..... (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand there might be some difficulty interpreting the word processor code and file structures. It might even be nigh IMPOSSIBLE. Has anyone ever heard of any sort of interpreter for communication with a Brother word processor, or is that info stritclty porprietary and FORBIDDEN?
Even easier would be to somehow allow my PC to read the file structure for the floppies. Is there any info on the fundamentals of the Brother word processor's file structure floating around out there? Aren't there other people who have data on these things and would like it transferred to another format? I can't imagine this sort of thing has not been looked into yet.
Re:Printer? (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose it depends on your insurer, but I would think that level of sophistication you have would be a pretty safe bet to meet the criteria.
Re:Allow me to glom..... (Score:2, Interesting)
ideas and problems (Score:5, Interesting)
First, traditional electric typewriters were mostly mechanical beasts (electric, not electronic) actauted by springs and levers with the user's finger motion enhanced by a flywheel. Only the flywheel was driven electrically, all the rest was mechanical. This means that there are no electical siganls generated when the user presses a key, just a series of levers and catches that connect the flywheel with a typearm and some mechanism to advance the carriage. Even the carriage return and platen advance was mechanical: as the carriage advanced a spring was stretched. The carriage return released the carriage, which was pulled rapidly to the right by the carriage return spring. When the carriage slams into the stop at the rightmost end of travel, a pin or wedge caused the platen to advance to the next line. The driving force for the platen advance was the momentum of the returning carriage.
In theory, you could instrument the typewriters mechanics with sensors to detect key presses and carriage return events using optical or electronic sensors. The sensor states would be fed into a microcontroller which would format them for communication over the USB port. This would allow you to use the typewriter as an input device.
Using the typewriter as an ouput device, however, is more complicated. You would actually have to add a bunch of actuators (solenoids, for example) to the typewriter's mechanism. I can think of a few ways to do this, but they are all labor intensive (I'd mount the solenoids vertically beneath the typewriter and connect each solenoid to the actual key it drives by a wire or shaft. When the soleniod is activated, the key is physically pulled down, just as if the key had been pressed normally.) and power hungry. Again, a microcontroller would be used to accept data from the USB port and translate it into signals to actuate the solenoids. The MCU would need to keep track of, or be able to sense, carriage position and put suitable delays between keystrokes to prevent jamming the device.
It all sound quite fascinating, but of very little practical value. It is likely to be a bit costly as well, but that shouldn't stop the dedicated hobbyist. Of course, for a lot less effort and money you may still be able to find an old ASR-33 [pdp8.net] teletype [columbia.edu] with an optional RS232 interface (most ASR-33's used current-loop [made-it.com] interfaces, which are not directly compatible with RS232). These old teletypes are pretty much what you are looking for, ready-made. You may freely substitute a DECwriter [columbia.edu] for the ASR-33 and I think there may be some versions of the IBM selectric [wikipedia.org] that also fit the bill.
We did this in the '80s (Score:5, Interesting)
The Selectric was already wired to accept electronic input, but not in ASCII. It expected tilt-and-rotate codes, which were directly transmitted to the golf ball shaped typing element [ibm.com]. To translate the TRS-80's ASCII to tilt/rotate codes, my parents drew up a table of equivalents. Then, my dad came up with a way to logically combine the TRS-80's output with values stored in an EPROM to get the tilt/rotate codes.
I ended up using the computer for my typing class homework. Fortunately, the teacher didn't mind that I was writing BASIC programs like this:
10 A$ = "THE QUICK BROWN DOG ATE THE LAZY FOX"
20 FOR I% = 1 TO LEN(A$)
30 POKE addr, ASC(MID$(A$, I%, 1))
35 some sort of delay for the ball to get repositioned
40 NEXT
I thought I was getting away with something... but my teacher wisely realized that I was actually doing more typing by hacking around than I would have been if I'd used the actual typewriter.
I did this (Score:4, Interesting)
The machine was an IBM Selectric editing machine, designed to read paper tape and punch it. My dad wired amps to the paper tape reader so that the parallel port of a CP/M machine could drive it. I wrote the CP/M printer driver to convert ASCII to the codes the typewriter used. I think it was 5-bit, and there was a code for shift-up and another for shift-down, so the driver had to keep track of this state.
It printed quite beautifully, exactly like a typewriter. At the time everybody only had dot matrix, so reports and letters typed by this thing looked vastly superior.
It could also print proportional space (excellent for writing reviews of Bush's service records) but we did not have the printhead, which apparently turned this on.
The inverse problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The ElectriClerk is quite a sight BTW, and well worth looking at for inspiration with the current topic.
Done that, not fun (Score:2, Interesting)
robot arm (Score:2, Interesting)
Not quite the original question, but I'm guessing you're looking for cool more than utility.
--Corprew