I recently got inspired again to improve my weather station and add some functionality to it, and I came upon a brick wall.

For no apparent reason, after playing around with some things, the printer was no longer working properly. It would attempt to print the start of the first line, and suddenly give out. The top two lines are the printer attempting to print, the bottom is the intended result.

It seemed to be an issue with power being disrupted somehow. My worst fear was that the printer was dying. I spent some time tinkering with the code to see if anything else was affecting the printer, but even a simple print command would fail. Next I grabbed a new 5V power supply and hooked it up with a serial monitor program to send data to it. It worked!

It was pretty easy after that to find the issue. The culprit:

These are the headers for the power and data lines to the printer. I tightened up the contacts and made sure the connection was nice and snug. The printer was working perfectly again. The loose power connection was causing the power to the printer to be unstable, and lead to failure.

The lesson learned here is that the CSN-A2 thermal receipt printer demands uninterrupted, stable power. Before this I knew that slightly loose data cables could cause huge problems, but I didn't think that a slightly loose power connection would also have such an adverse affect.

Next project log will focus on my plans for improvements.