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

# Print to printer
python3 morningedition.py

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

Already configured at 6:30am Central Time:

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

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.

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