The problem
When I need a break from technology, I garden, growing herbs and the odd vegetable. That seques into cooking with what I’ve grown.
I’ve got lots of recipes for lots of cuisines, Mexican, Italian, Indian, English, German, Chinese, the Good Old USA, Panama, the world over. They’re held in many forms, 3×5 index cards, 4×6 index cards, loose-leaf binders, hardbound books, and saved web pages. But one of my principal “go-to” places for recipes is my desktop computer.
The Gourmet Recipe Manager is a very useful open-source program. It’s easy to use, easy to search, and while I have had some times when I had issues with the databases, generally easy to maintain. It can even scrape recipe webpages. At one time, in fact, it came with a set of templates that understood many common recipe websites and could automatically parse them, although that feature hasn’t been available for a while.
But having a database is one thing. Using it is another. I keep the recipes database file on one of my servers, where it’s not only accessible from the desktop app, but also from a custom webapp I wrote that allows me to search and display recipes on a tablet device.
You’d think that was enough, but I don’t really care to toss a tablet around in the kitchen and the screensaver turns things off at annoying times or else I have to burn power to keep the screen on. While I’ve been tempted to take my original epaper Nook and make it a permanent kitchen fixture, it hasn’t really been that attractive an idea.
So there are 2 other options I had. One, write down the essentials on paper or 2, print them. If I write them manually, I can’t read my own writing, but it seemed such a waste to fire up the printer and spit out a full-sized sheet of paper that I was only actually going to use a few square inches of.
So I’ve come up with another alternative.
The thermal printers used with Point-of-Sale (POS) cash register systems are fairly inexpensive. They use a minimal amount of paper and because they use inexpensive thermal paper, there’s no overpriced ink or toner to buy. There’s a standard interface (5v serial RS-232) and protocol (ESC/POS) that allows one to interface simply. Because I wanted to be able to put the printer anywhere it was convenient without worrying about wires, I got a model that supports Bluetooth.
It’s a cute little critter, smaller and lighter than I’d expected – I’d been anticipating something about the size of the ones at the grocery store, but this unit just about fits in the palm of my tiny hand and has a battery that’s good for several days on a charge, so not even a power cable is required most of the time.
The tricky part was in getting it to talk to my computer.
My first attempts were from an Android tablet – there are several apps in the Google Play store that can talk to devices like this, although none that fully support what I want. The important thing, however, was that I was able to confirm that I could pair to the printer and do basic printing.
Getting a Desktop PC Bluetooth link
Now that I knew the printer worked, I plugged a Bluetooth dongle into my server. That’s when the trouble began.
The standard Linux interface to Bluetooth these days is BlueZ. It gets a lot of criticism:
- User Documentation is virtually non-existent
- The source code has virtually no comments in it (this demotes you to “amateur”grammer in my view).
- There are several different versions of it, which are radically different from each other. Doing an Internet search is especially perilous, since you often get returned results telling you to use obsolete or not-yet-available tools.
Things don’t get any easier, since Bluetooth itself has gone through several versions, too. Bluetooth 4, alias Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is popular, but a lot of devices fall back to simpler, earlier protocols. Some of the services that BLE is supposed to support may not be available (or are still incomplete) in BlueZ, and the devices themselves.
It’s a mess, and begs for someone to come in and do a professional job of cataloging and documenting. And putting some EXPLETIVE DELETED comments in the source code.
But the long and short of it is that what I determined I needed to get my recipes printed was RFCOMM, which provides serial port services for Bluetooth. Bluetooth can do many other things, up to and including TCP/IP and OBEX (the Object Exchange protocol used, for example, to beam pictures to/from cellphones and other devices), but RFCOMM is what I needed.
That means that I had to ensure that the core bluez modules were installed on my desktop Linux system and that the bluetooth service was started. It also meant that I had to create an /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf file that defined the target printer and in particular, its MAC address. Then I had to create a /var/lib/bluetooth/aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff/pincodes file that mapped that MAC address to the PIN code for the printer (1234, in my case).
The “aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff: directory appeared by magic, apparently when I first plugged in the dongle. Its actual name is the MAC address of the dongle itself. Looking at web-search results, I think the single most frustrating thing for most people was understanding when you had to refer to the dongle’s MAC address and when you had to refer to the target device’s MAC address. Failure to keep the 2 straight tends to make the RFCOMM utility whine about “no route to host”.
Incidentally, the command:
hcitool dev
should list the MAC address of the dongle (or built-in adapter, if you are using a machine with factory Bluetooth). This would typically be listed as the “hci0” device.
The command
hcitool scan
Should allow you to enumerate the Bluetooth devices that are broadcasting and ready to pair. Unlike a lot of other Bluetooth devices, my POS printer apparently is always ready to pair and doesn’t have a magic button to prep it.
Once all of the above are ready, you can bind the rfcomm device.
In theory, that would be as simple as this:
rfcomm bind 0
But in practice, you’ll get a “missing dev parameter” error message, Instead, you have to include the printer’s MAC address on the rfcomm command line – it can’t simply look up a logical name or unit ID from the rfcomm.conf and use the MAC address in there for some strange reason.
OK, with (a great deal!) of luck, you now have a “/dev/rfcomm0” device that you can talk to. Printing is as simple as redirecting an “echo” command to that device. While you can use all sorts of neat ESC/POS control codes to select fonts, justifications, bar codes and stuff, simple text lines ending with a linefeed character (no carriage return) are quite adequate.
Printing a Recipe
So much for the hard part. What I did next was simply yank a recipe out of the Gourmet database and enumerate its ingredients list. I didn’t bother with the cooking instructions because it’s a simple recipe and besides the line width of the POS printer is only about 32 characters and I didn’t want to deal with that just yet (text will wrap, but I’m not sure how much text the printer’s buffer will tolerate).
So here’s a python script to print recipe #37, which is the recipe ID in the database I found when I searched recipe titles for “Apple Oat Crisp”.
#!/bin/python
# Print a recipe to the Bluetooth (/dev/rfcomm0) POS thermal printer
#
import sqlite3
conn = sqlite3.connect('recipes.db')
c = conn.cursor()
t = (37,) # the recipe ID in the database
c.execute('SELECT title from recipe where id=?', t)
title = c.fetchone()[0]
print '*** ',title,' ***'
for r in c.execute('SELECT amount, unit, item FROM ingredients WHERE recipe_id = ?', t):
print r[0],' ',r[1],' ',r[2]
This small script actually outputs to stdout, but by redirecting stdout to /dev/rfcomm0, I got my recipe print!
Future enhancements
It would, of course, be nice if I could make this function be a plugin to the Gourmet Recipe Manager app itself, but that’s no big deal.
Of more immediate concern is normalizing the output and adapting it to the shorter print lines. The Gourmet Recipe Manager stores units pretty much verbatim, so you’ll find units like “Tablespoons” instead of “tbsp”, and units are “2.0 Cups” of flour. The worst of all is “1.6666666667” tsp salt instead of 1 1/3 tsp. So a little tweaking of the data before printing would be nice.