June 2010
Doc ID 16916 Rev 1
1/30
UM0886
User manual
STEVAL-IPC002V1 demonstration board
for parking ticket vending machine
Introduction
A parking ticket vending machine is a hand-held, battery operated device, inside of which a
thermal printer is interfaced with the STM32 microcontroller from STMicroelectronics. This
document focuses on the STEVAL-IPC002V1 demonstration board, whose objective is to
print and generate parking tickets for different types of vehicles. The application can easily
be modified to suit other applications where paper printing is to be managed directly by the
microcontroller, such as POS-based applications, railway and bus ticket printing
applications, standalone printers, and the like.
Figure 1.
STM32-based parking ticket vending machine
The thermal printer has an in-built stepper motor for thermal paper feeding, paper
movement, and so on. The stepper motor is controlled by a dedicated stepper-motor driver
with an SPI interface. The system operates on two Li-Ion batteries and an optional DC
adaptor. On-board battery chargers are available to charge the batteries from the DC
adaptor. The data to be printed is entered by way of touch keys, and can be verified on an
alphanumeric LCD.