Ticket printing

[akx]

Here are some random thoughts about physical ticket printing:

• Tickets reserved via Paikkala could be physically printed, e.g. with a thermal printer.
• This happens in exchange for the ticket's code, so the flow is
  • the reserver reserves an e-ticket
  • the reserver ambulates up to a ticket printing terminal
  • the reserver types in the code
  • the terminal prints the ticket and marks the ticket printed
• Printed tickets can not be used as e-tickets (so a status field is required).

Thoughts on the thermal printing bit:

• Thermal printers are relatively easy to control over USB/RS232 using the ESC/POS protocol, see e.g. https://mitxela.com/projects/thermal_paper_polaroid and https://gist.github.com/scruss/36c31a9b653779b2b7d1 and so on
• However, hooking this up to the Paikkala web UI needs a local server on the ticket printing terminal. I'm thinking something like a simple Node.js thingamajig with CORS turned all the way permissive, so the web UI will just do something like POST http://localhost:28784/print (28784 being the decimal representation of pp, for paikkala print 😄) with a JSON payload, and the Node widget would then reformat and pipe that out over USB for hardcore printing action.