MorningNews

An MQTT and HomeAssistant driven automatic news printer

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Wiring
• Configuration
• Installation
• Usage with HomeAssistant
  • Running without HomeAssistant
• 3D-Printable case
• Troubleshooting
• Contributing

Requirements

• A Raspberry Pi Zero W.
  • Or a standard Pi Zero with a small USB-OTG dongle [1, 2] and a supported USB WiFi adapter.
• A TTL-capable thermal printer (Adafruit, AliExpress).
• (Optional) A HomeAssistant server with an embedded or external MQTT server.

Wiring

Raspberry	Printer	Power Supply
Pin 4 (5V)	VCC	5V
Pin 6 (GND)	GND	GND
Pin 8 (TX)	RX
Pin 10 (RX)	TX

As usual with Pis, a power supply of at least 2A is recommended.

Configuration

You can either edit the main config.yaml file or create a config.local.yaml copy of it that, if present, will be read instead.

1. Fill the mqtt section with your MQTT server's details.
2. The printer section preconfigured for Raspbian; if you chose to use another distro, these values may need to be tweaked.
3. The maxRows key in the filter section defines the maximum number of rows that an article's fields are allowed to occupy when being printed.
4. Change your desired locale for date formatting in the locale section.
5. Add RSS feeds' URLs in the feeds section.
   • url is the direct URL to the XML feed. Some feeds may show a rich interface when viewed from a browser even if the URL is correct.
   • schema is a list that specifies which sections of the feed's articles you want to print out.
     • Possible values are title and description, respectively for the title and summary/content of the article.
   • count specifies how many of the latest articles you want to fetch from this feed.

Installation

1. Prepare your RPi Zero as usual. Using Raspbian Lite is recommended.
2. Run sudo raspi-config on it:
   1. Interfacing options > Serial > No (disable the login shell) > Yes (enable the serial port hardware).
   2. Note: reboot at least once before connecting the printer, if possible. System logs could get printed out while shutting down otherwise.
3. Install NodeJS manually.
   • The most recent armv6l prebuilt archive still available seems to be v11.15.0.
   • For enhanced ease of use, just download the tarball and extract in the root of your filesystem. This would be bad practice in standard systems.
4. Clone this repo in your user's home.
   • git clone https://github.com/nmaggioni/MorningNews.git /home/pi/MorningNews
5. Run the install script: ./install.sh . The script will automatically take the following actions:
   1. Install the needed tools and dependencies from Raspbian's repos.
   2. Download and build the needed NodeJS dependencies.
   3. Create en entry in your crontab that will start the MQTT/HomeAssistant script at boot.
   4. Create a logrotate entry to ensure that logs don't grow too large.
6. Reboot.

Usage with HomeAssistant

Make sure that your HA instance has MQTT discovery enabled.

Upon boot, the MorningNews MQTT script will make new entities available in HA:

You can then customize them to your liking with the usual methods.

Running without HomeAssistant

The core NodeJS project can easily be ran standalone: just run ./print_news.sh or npm start whenever you want to print some news.

3D-Printable case

The /docs/printable_box folder contains a simple case for mounting the printer with the included hardware and sliding a Pi Zero underneath it. The back cover has holes for routing both a Micro USB cable for powering the Pi and a 2-pin JST-PH connector for powering the printer, in case you want to power them from different sources.

The fit of the back cover may require tweaking depending on your printer's characteristics.

Troubleshooting

The printer's front LED doesn't blink.

Make sure the printer is correctly powered.

The printer doesn't print.

Given that no scripts are logging any error, your printer might be recognized under a different serial port or could be using a different baud rate.

If /dev/ttyAMA0 is present of your system, try setting the baud rate in the config file to 19200.

If everything else fails, power on the printer while holding the button on the front: a diagnostics page will be printed and it might contain some clues.

Something is wrong with the contents of the feeds.

Manually execute SIMULATE_PRINTER=1 npm start to show debug info and simulate the printer by outputting directly to screen.

Contributing

Feel free to dive in! Open an issue or submit PRs.