morningedition

A daily morning receipt printer for the Epson TM-T88V thermal printer. Prints a personalized "newspaper" every morning at 6:30am via cron.

What it prints

• Header — date, time, location (Bridgeland, Cypress TX)
• On This Day — historical fact for today's date (when available)
• Weather — current conditions, hi/lo, humidity, UV, wind, sunrise/sunset via wttr.in
• Houston News — 5 live headlines from ABC13 RSS
• World News — 5 live headlines from BBC RSS
• Thought for the Day — rotating daily quote
• Morning Chuckle — rotating daily joke
• Did You Know? — rotating daily fun fact
• Local Tip — rotating Bridgeland/Houston tips

Requirements

• Python 3 (stdlib only, no pip installs needed)
• Epson TM-T88V connected via USB, configured in CUPS as printer name receipt
• Internet connection at print time (weather + news)

Usage

# Print to printer
python3 morningedition.py

# Preview in terminal (no printing)
python3 morningedition.py --preview

Cron setup

Already configured at 6:30am Central Time:

CRON_TZ=America/Chicago
30 6 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /home/rich/Devel/morningedition/morningedition.py

Printer notes

• Prints in raw ESC/POS mode (lpr -P receipt -o raw) — faster and more reliable than CUPS rendering
• Paper cut is handled via GS V 0x00 in the ESC/POS byte stream
• ASCII only — no emoji or unicode
• WIDTH = 30 currently because the printer NV memory is locked to 58mm paper mode (even though 80mm rolls are loaded). To fix: use Epson TM Utility on Windows to set Memory Switch → Paper Width → 80mm, then change WIDTH = 30 → WIDTH = 42 in morningedition.py line 23.

Files

File	Purpose
morningedition.py	Main script
diagnose.py	ESC/POS font/width diagnostic prints
diagnose2.py	Print area and character spacing diagnostics
fixwidth.py	NV paper-width fix attempts (v1)
fixwidth2.py	NV memory switch sweep (v2)
readmsw.py	Attempted memory switch readback via USB