A LA QRTE: QR Code Menu Printer

Turn a QR code restaurant menu into a physical copy, right at your table.

Guy Dupont

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Description

A portable, combination scanner/printer for converting QR code menus into physical copies.

Ultimately a very simple build! tl;dr:
- Runs on a rechargeable 12V battery.
- Uses a Tiny Code Reader (from Useful Sensors) for QR scanning.
- Uses a Seeed Studio XIAO Esp-32 S3 to read from the scanner, communicate with the backend, and drive the thermal printer module.
- Talks to a web server written in Python that fetches menus, scrapes the text, feeds it to ChatGPT, and formats the final result.

Details

I'm working on a schematic for this, but it's taking a while since I'm using so many "module" parts that dont have symbols. In the meantime, here's a description of what's going on:

Power comes from a rechargeable 12V battery, which is cut off from the rest of the circuit by the chonky SPST power switch.
After the switch the 12V is fed directly to the thermal printer's power input, and also into a regulator module that drops it down to 5V.
The XIAO:
- is powered by 5V
- Sends out printer commands using it's UART
- Speaks the the web server via WiFi
- Drives the WS2812 with GPIO D0 (and powers it via it's 3.3V pin)
- Speaks to the Tiny Code Reader via I2C (and powers it via it's 3.3V pin)
This printer does not accept normal TTL logic input (without modification) - it needs RS232. So a Max3232 takes the UART output from the XIAO and converts it to RS232 for the printer.