The Amazing Steampunked "Ticker Machine"

Hi everybody!

A couple of month ago I build Dr. Brain .
Dr. Brain is able to listen, to see and to talk.
But he is not bale to write.
So I build the amazing "Ticker Machine" for Dr. Brain and other calculating devices with
a seriell interface.

It is easy to build the parts are easy to get.

Step 1: Parts and Materials

You need:

a thermo printer (this is operated by 24V and has a serial interface you can buy this on ebay)
a wooden plate or something similar
a glas dome hat fits on the plate 
a box or a paper tube for the stand
some stain
some pieces of beach wood fpr the paper holder
some brass parts, screws, nuts and gears.

And don´t forget to "glue some gears on it"  ;-)

Step 2: Build the Printer Stand

First I cut the paper out slot and drilled the holes for mounting the printer to the top and the electronics to the bottom of the plate.
This quite a bit tricky because I like to have the printer visible. So I have to build something that guides the paper from the printer through the glass dome to outlet.
I used some thin wood and bend it a bit then I glued it to the wooden plate as shown on picture 5.

Step 3: Building the Paper Holder and the Stand

The paper holder was build from beach wood.
I used the original holder for the paper roll as a part of the holder to make it easier adjust the right distance between the holders.
Than it was mounted and adjusted behind the printer.
Some gears to make it a bit more "mechanical".
Than I glued the plate to stained paper tube.
The Paper tube was glued to the base stand as well.
I attached four brass feet to the base stand.
The base stand is open on the bottom, so it it possible to connect the 24V Power supply and serial cable to the printer.
The small glas tube on the front indicates "power on" and was made from an old water gauge.

Step 4: Operate It

The printer comes with a standard windows driver.
With this driver, you can control the feed, the font and the cutter of the printer.
I used the scheduler of WINDOWS to print messages.
To do so you have to schedule a task and execute a BATCH - File that prints the message.
Both the notepad and write can be called with a command line parameter to print on the default printer:

@echo off
write.exe /p message.doc

this will print the file message.doc (created with write.exe) on the default printer.

So it is possible to to print time based messages.

In the internet, you can find thunderbird 3.x and an addon that is called autoprint.
If you install this on the computer where the printer is connected with, it is possible to auto print emails.
This is a very funny feature.

So have fun everybody,


H. Steam