Today I am kickstarting my ASCII Art Printer project. Recently for a school project I made an ascii art generation, i.e. a program that takes an image and reproduces it using ASCII characters. After enjoying the results of my labour, the idea popped into my head: how awesome would it be to see one of these images typed out by an old fashion, loud, electric typewriter. Feeling impulsive I ran out and bought a Smith Corona electric typewriter on Kijiji for $20 and got to work.
So far this does not seem to bad, so far this is my plan of action
1. probe the pins on the back of the keyboard cable connector to determine the pinout, scanning frequency, and key mapping
2. solder wires from pins on the keyboard connector to hook in an Arduino or similar microprocessor
3. the arduino can then simulate a key press on the keyboard to type a letter and thus print ascii images.
Thus far I am trying to obtain access to an oscilloscope to better analyze the keyboard pinout and frequency more easily
I will follow up with code and schematics once I make more progress.