PROGRAMMING

Creating a web front end for the SmartMatrix parallel printer server

Having a hardware device is all very well. But it becomes so much more powerful when you can use it easily, and from anywhere in the house.

All images by the author.

The SmartMatrix device is an open source hardware project based around the Raspberry Pi Pico 2W. It lets you output to any printer with a Centronics-type parallel port from a modern computer. With it, you can easily print your text files — logs, program listings or whatever — over the network. Its wifi-enabled network interface acts like a classic HP DirectJet port, meaning that drivers are available.

However, I used the word ‘easily’ there, and can imagine that some people might take issue with that. The network interface is a raw socket server that simply accepts any bytes you throw at it and forwards them to the printer. (There’s also a serial interface, but we’ll leave that alone for this article.) But how do you make your computer throw those bytes the SmartMatrix’s way?

You can set up a driver via CUPS on Linux (and possibly macOS too), if you’re happy tinkering on the command line. But I thought: wouldn’t it be nice if there were a simple app I could use to print files? In fact, I thought that…