Daily Status for Adafruit Thermal Printer

This is a Python script that prints a daily status report on your Adafruit Thermal Printer.

Description

For a previous project I bought the Adafruit Thermal Printer. I also had an old Raspberry Pi 1 lying around and so I thought: why not combine the two and build a fun project that prints a daily status report with the events of the day, a weather report and some other more or less useful information.

The script consists of separated modules, each of which prints a separate part of the report. With this design, it is easy to add new modules to the report. As of now, the following modules exist:

• Greeter:
  Prints a greeting with the user's name. Also prints the day and date the report is generated for.

• Calendar:
  This module connects to a user's google calendar and prints the upcoming events for the day of interest. A description on how to set up the module can be found here.

• Weather:
  Prints a weather report for the day of interest (with min. and max. temperatures and precipitation probability). The data is obtained from the darksky.net API.

• News:
  Prints some trending headlines. The default version prints the 3 top headlines in Germany. The data is obtained from the newsapi.org API.

• Postillon:
  This module prints pun headlines provided by Der Postillon, a satiric german news site (quite similar to The Onion).

Usage

To use this script, simply clone the repository. The Adafruit printer library is included in this repository as a git submodule, you might have to download it by executing the following commands in the root directory of this repository:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Make sure the submodule (at lib/printer) is checked out at the latest commit (master branch).

Before you can run the script, copy the file config_example.py and save it as config.py. This file contains some settings you might want to adjust (every option is documented by comments in the file, simply have a look around).

Install the dependencies (listed in the provided Pipfile, pipenv can be used to install the dependencies).

Instructions on how to set up the hardware (i.e. how to connect printer and Raspberry Pi) can be found in this Adafruit Tutorial. However, only the GND and RX pins have to be connected (some sources say that connecting the TX pin could damage the RasPi).

To actually print the report, run python3.6 main.py in the root directory of the repository.

If something doesn't work as intended, feel free to open a new Issue or fix the problem yourself and open a PR ;)

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi 1 (might also work with later models, although additional configuration might be necessary due to issues with the serial port caused by the bluetooth module on the Model 3)

• Adafruit Thermal Printer (other Adafruit printer kits could also be used)

• Python 3.6 installed on the Raspberry Pi (pip or pipenv for easy installation of the required libraries)

• for the Calendar module: a Google API console project and, of course, a Google account. See here for further instructions.

• for the Weather module: a darksky.net API key (free for developers).

• for the News module: a newsapi.org API key (free as well)