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: