Post one on my latest Arduino project. The goal: get a dot matrix printer and turn it into a step sequenced drum machine using Arduino as the brains….
Last week I acquired the dot matrix printer for free off of a Craigslist posting from Brisbane’s city hall, which is close to my office. This thing weighs about 50 pounds, but it’s perfect for the job. Tonight, I spent a few hours stripping the data cable down to bare wires and tagging each wire with its corresponding pin on the centronics parallel connector. It was a bit tedious, but had to be done. Tomorrow I’m hoping to actually plug these wires into the microcontroller to find out if I can control the printer. Stay tuned…
The idea isn’t exactly new, but I wanted to give it a try myself… here’s a really great example of someone re-purposing old computer hardware as an instrument:
Great post.. That video is so awesome.. I really need to get my arduino setup so I can contribute to something like this..
This is great. Can’t wait to see the next step. Are there online tutorials that you’re basing this stuff on that we can read?
Maybe a site or an explainer on Arduino would be helpful as well since most like me are dum dums about it.