Mini Serial TTL Thermal Printer Token Machine

Managing a queue becomes much more difficult when the time taken to serve cannot be predetermined due to various reasons. The least that the service seekers expect is to be served on a First Come First Serve basis. To ensure this one of the methods that were traditionally followed was to hand over recycled tokens to the patients walking in and make them meet the concerned consultant upon being called. This manual process is very tedious and prone to human errors, suspicion of tampering, and communication problems among hospital staff. Such problems made it necessary to have an automatic Token Management System in place.

The most important part of this project is as follows.

• The power supply
• Thermal printer (Download Datasheet)
• RTC DS1307
• SWITCH

Hardware Requirements:

• Arduino UNO
• Thermal Printer
• Small Bread Board
• Connectors
• RTC DS1307
• 12v,2AMP Power adapter
• Variety of connectors

 

External Power Supply:

• Transformer 12-0-12, 2amp – 1no
• 1N4007 bridge diode – 4nos
• 1000uF capacitor, 40v – 1no
• LM7805 Voltage regulator - 1no
• LM7805 Voltage regulator - 1no
• 5mm RED LED - 1no
• 1K ohm resistor  - 1no

Software Requirements:

• Arduino IDE (You can download it from HERE).
• Printer Adafruit library (Download link HERE). 
• Arduino RTC Library (Download it from HERE).
• Wire Library (Inbuilt within the IDE)
• Software Serial Library (Inbuilt within the IDE)

Circuit diagram: Follow the circuit diagram below the table and make the connection correctly.

 

 

Connection details:

DS1307 RTC module: Please visit this article to know how to interface the DS1307 RTC module with Arduino UNO. As we know the RTC is powered with a built-in button cell which helps to track the real-time. Please refer to the below table or you can follow the tutorial on how to interface RTC.

 

DS1307 RTC	Arduino UNO
SDA	A4 (SDA)
SCL	A5 (SCL)
VCC	5v
GND	GND

 

Thermal Printer: Please visit this article to know how to interface the Thermal printer with Arduino UNO. As we know the printer works on serial communication which makes use of Tx and Rx for communication. Please refer to the below table or you can follow the tutorial on how to interface Thermal Printer.

THERMAL PRINTER	Arduino UNO
Tx	D5
Rx	D6
VCC	5v
GND	GND

 

Switch: The switch is connected to the Arduino UNO pin number A0. And the pin A0 default state is HIGH through the resistor.

Download the complete source code: click here

Video Tutorial