Random lateral offset to simulate old school machines

[andreisperid]

As in: https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/diy-automated-printer-kerchunks-out-classic-embossed-labels/#comment-6484170

[sabeechen]

I've been playing with this, firmware support only, by adding a jank parameter between [0, 1] to tag requests that adds both lateral offset (feed length per character) and rotation offset (the carousel). I'm using the ESP32's built in hardware random generator so it really is random, or at least cryptographically so. Not enough projects use that nifty feature. Here is how it looks:

Some thoughts:

• I was hoping the carousel rotation randomness would create a bit of a "tilt/skew" effect for the letters, but it seems the carousel is too wide for that to show. Might not be worth doing since it just makes higher jank values impractical, like the unreadable "jank 0.4" label that almost printed "jiankl 0.45".
• Interesting that the jank 0.3 label randomly had nearly perfect kerning around the ".". Interesting.
• Might be worthwhile to constrain the jank value to "saner" bounds, eg from [0, 0.4] so you are less likely to have letters print on top of eachother. Or maybe thats the idea?

[andreisperid]

The original engineers are summoned from the grave, we are aiming to do what they always wanted to avoid!

Perhaps to increase the jankyness, what about a -0.3 to 0.3 value? This way the letters can dance both ways.

PS: real cool to know about the hardware random generator, didn't know about that! 🤓