Lucky Panda Fortune Teller

I finally finished this project. I had previously made a much smaller version with only a LCD screen, but no printer as they were not available at the time.

First I started out getting the thermal printer to work with an Arduino and a LCD screen.

Once I had this working, I wanted to make a more permanent version.  About this time Adafruit started selling perma proto boards. These are great for soldering your project into and are very sturdy.  I also ordered a RBB Pro from Modern Device.  This great little Arduino clone fit nicely into the Adafruit proto board.  I received the RBB Pro first and moved the prototyping to a larger board.  I then added 4 LEDs and a great arcade style button.

Eventually I also added a tiny speaker I had and a real time clock.  Here is my messy prototype with the speaker and clock along with the 4 LEDs.

Once the Adafruit proto board arrived it was time to start soldering it together.

First I soldered the resistors onto the LED leads and then covered them with shrink wrap.

I added the resistors here instead of on the board to save room. Then I soldered the RBB Pro onto the proto shield.

At the same time I also started working on building a case for all of this.    Originally I wanted a fortune cookie shape or a Chinese food takeout box shape.  Both of these proved to hard, so I went with an old school arcade game shaped box made out of plywood.

Many thanks to Bildr and the thermal printer library they made.  One note about the library and code.  Around this time Arduino moved to version 1.o.  The code and library I used work with the previous version of Arduino, not 1.0.

Here is the code I used Lucky Panda Fortune Teller.

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