AirWriter: AirPrint and AppleTalk for the ImageWriter (ESP32 + TashTalk)

[wells]

Hi all! I've been building a little adapter for my ImageWriter II since August, and it's working well enough now that I wanted to share it here.

It plugs into the printer's serial port. My iPhone and Macbook see it as a regular AirPrint printer, and my SE/30 sees an AppleTalk ImageWriter in the Chooser over a LocalTalk cable or over Wi-Fi through its BlueSCSI. Basilisk II and Infinite Mac can print to it as well.

Inside there's an ESP32-S3 and @Tashtari's TashTalk on a PIC (which the ESP32 can flash in place so you don't need a PIC programmer). The LocalTalk side follows FeralFirmware's TashTalkUSB.

I'm a product designer by trade, so I've put a lot of care into the parts you see and touch. There's a dot-grid panel with 37 LEDs on top that shows what the board and the printer are up to (for debugging and... being honest, because I thought it was fun). The settings page looks like a little Platinum-styled settings app. The case is 3D printed, but the top shell is a bare PCB with translucent circles to let the LEDs shine up from underneath. I got the idea from Eurorack panels which look so cool to me.

I've seen a couple other similar projects pop up, which is really cool! I wanted to have an all-in-one device: AirPrint, LocalTalk, and EtherTalk over Wi-Fi with no intermediate computer required.

Where it's at
- Rev A boards arrived last week and are working end-to-end with my ImageWriter II
- code, STLs, and PCB design on GitHub -- but I'm still working thru testing and software tweaks
- Prints in color and b&w
- I don't have any other printers to test with... but I also want to add support for LaserWriter printers too

Here it is in action:

Thanks to @Tashtari for TashTalk, FeralFirmware for TashTalkUSB and TailTalk, and Mihai for Infinite Mac.

Questions and ideas welcome! Does anyone want to be a tester??

 

[wells]

Some more pics:

Let me know if you'd be interested in getting one!

 

[PL212]

Interesting! Are you doing 'Imagewriter Emulation' at all (print to PDF or TIFF, for example), or is the focus bridging to real hardware printers?

 

[wells]

My focus has been on the latter, but I'm curious what your use case would be for printing to PDF / TIFF (presumably from a vintage Mac?)

 

[PL212]

It's interesting -- there's a certain class of *very* early Mac software, before the Chooser or even Choose Printer, which assumes that only an Imagewriter I could ever be hooked up. Trying to print a file from the first version of MacPaint, or an Errata doc from Lightspeed Pascal, for example. Obviously this isn't an AppleTalk scenario; you'd need to capture the raw serial data, either from a real Mac or an emulator, and then 'render' it into a bitmap.

There's a hack to do this that I've gotten working with Snow, here:

Virtual Imagewriter for very early System software

@stepleton posted a great idea over on the Lisa forums, to intercept serial data from LisaOS and use Apple's own ImageWriter-to-Postscript code, originally intended for the Apple IIgs, to produce a .ps file. This can can then be distilled into a PDF. I'm interested in this same technique for...

68kmla.org

 

[wells]

That's a neat idea. As long as there's a way to get a physical connection to the computer (or emulator), the AirWriter could possibly be set up to emulate an ImageWriter I

 

[wells]

A couple updates since my last post:

1. I bought a LaserWriter (PLW NTR)! And with it, was able to add support for laserwriters and other localtalk printers.
2. I bought a StyleWriter and plan to add support for those as well. Originally I was under the impression that cartridges were hard to find, but it seems like some models have carts that are still produced today. bolacore/feralfirmware has been a big help on this front
3. Since it seems like there's interest, I put together a page for folks to register interest in getting one. I'm considering placing an order from PCBway in the next couple weeks now that the firmware is in a better spot, and the hardware has been tested.

In the meantime, I'm looking for one or two people who have a variety of printers who might be interested in testing the rev1 boards. Apple printers are pretty quirky and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some quirks I haven't encountered yet.

I also want to try adding QuickDraw support. This will be in partnership with bolacore on 68kmla... would be cool since QuickDraw has yet to have its drivers decompiled.