[Tom Verbeure] not long ago identified himself lamenting the need to take display grabs from an Advantest R3273 spectrum analyzer with a telephone camera, as the older gear involves you to both grab tables of facts over an highly-priced GPIB interface card, or print them to paper. Then he recognized, why not make a straightforward printer port insert-on that looks like a printer, but sends the info around USB as a serial stream?
On the components side, the custom made PCB (KiCAD undertaking) is based on the Raspberry Pi Pico. Obvious type factor challenges apart ([Tom] did revise the PCB to make it scaled-down) this is a shrewd go, as this is not a significant-path gadget so working with the Pico as a USB-to-point answer is a price tag-effective way to get some thing operating with minimal risk. One fascinating style place was the use of the 74LVC161284 unique purpose bus interface that handles the 5 V tolerance that the RP2040 lacks, whilst producing the job compliant with IEEE-1284 — beneficial for the fussier devices.
Working with the services manual of the Sharp AP-PK11 copier/printer as a reference, [Tom] all over again, reveals how to accurately use the chip, reducing the structure hard work and scope for error. The total task, with preliminary firmware and every little thing needed to construct this point, can be observed on the task GitHub web page. [Tom] does add a warning even so that this project is however staying worked on so adopters might wish to bear that in head.
If you do not have these kinds of fancy bench instrumentation, but grabbing screenshots from devices that do not usually assist it, is far more your point, then how about a resource to get Recreation Boy screenshots?
