Android Java project — Receipt Generator using Android phone and Bluetooth thermal printer — Part 1 of 7 , Introduction to project

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This project is using Android Java to build a bluetooth thermal printer receipt generator. Below are pics of the project.

This project will be broken down to 7 parts as I want to provide all the steps clearly.

Receipt generated with bluetooth thermal printer, top without discount and bottom with.
Receipt generated on a A4 paper using wifi office desktop printer. Here the width only occupied 1/3 of the page.
The width can be adjusted to fit the whole A4 page.
The main page, or in Android development terms, the MainActivity. The red lines or words are for user input or for user to click.
clockwise from top left: The main page with the current date,
DatePicker appear when click the line under ‘Date’,
Input the quantity for the items which are listed on a RecyclerView (no discount),
Input the quantity for the items which are listed on a RecyclerView (with discount).
The ‘Ok’ menu item at top right will navigate to the print preview page shown below.
Due to space constraint of the thermal printer paper, the final printout on thermal printer is different from the format below. The format on the thermal printer will be the one like the 1st pic at the top of this post.

The final layout view before printing. The printer menu icon on the top right is for printing to wifi office printer.
The print grey button on the top left is for printing to bluetooth thermal printer.

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Ok, let’s start, below are the steps of this project:

  1. Part 1 of 7 — Introduction and description of project.
  2. Part 2 of 7 — Building the main page of the app, called the MainActivity activity.
  3. Part 3 of 7 — Build the RecyclerView, which is a big part of MainActivity, ghe scrollable list which contain the items.
  4. Part 4 of 7 — Build the rest of the actions and behaviour of the MainActivity
  5. Part 5 of 7 — Build the ReadyToPrint activity.
  6. Part 6 of 7 — Link to bluetooth thermal printer.
  7. Part 7 of 7 — Link to wifi office printer (optional)

Below is the flow diagram for this Android receipt generator with bluetooth thermal printer project.