There was a REALLY cool project by the design firm Berg in the UK about ~13 years ago. Cute little thermal printer with online services that allowed you to have scheduled printouts of things like weather reports, horoscopes, etc.
And... oh my goodness, I was looking for pictures of it and it turns out some kind person decided to put work in on having a way to do onprem services for it! [Check it out here](https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/)
> The team at Berg invested a lot of time developing the visual language and aesthetics of Little Printer, across the physical device and their web service.
Shame they didn't bother to invest any time in making sure their expensive devices wouldn't end up as paperweights. Seriously, it's infuriating that they were lauded for the creativity of this project but it's fallen to hobbyists and volunteers to engineer an entire suite of software to make this dead hardware work again, just because the initial developers were either too lazy, too shortsighted, or too restricted by bean-counters to develop open source (or at least self-hostable) software for these machines. You can't even change the server address of these things without hardware flashing and risking bricking your hub.
I know someone that this would be perfect for, but sadly too niche to have survived. It's a neat idea being able to get little "tickets" for various daily tasks for those that do better with those types of things compared to using a digital calendar
Yeah we unfortunately are spoiled with mass manufacturing. If they'd been popular enough for them to make a million Berg printers, the price would have been more in line with what we expect.
There's something quite pleasing about writing a message and living, at least, with the thought of it causing some physical action (printing) in the real world. I mean, for all we know Andrew probably ran out of printer paper hours ago so the message has gone into the ether, but it's nice to think it happened at least!
I've fantasized about fax phone banks for artists to send things out periodically.
The idea of a machine unexpectedly popping out a sheet of paper has gone from "this is all spam" to delightful again.
Physical items in a physical space whereby you call a place and not a person.
We've digitally moved from spaces to individuals and I think that's the main critique of the modern web: somehow networked ourselves but abandoned the networking of ourselves.
You could even do it all digitally somehow and just hook it up to a modern network printer. Whitelisted senders get printed while unrecognized ones enter a digital backlog.
The real desire is to explore the psuedo anonymous nature of the early web in a way that is robust to abuse.
I think the key point that would make this delightful is the whitelist. Lord knows the moment its opened up it'll be spammed with the worst things bored teenagers can find.
It lingers in fat tissue and once at a low enough level your liver doesn't really clear it. But that kind of level isn't necessarily linked to increased risks of diabetes or heart disease.
"In the 2010s public health agencies in the EU,[81][82][83] US,[84][85] Canada,[86] Australia[87] and Japan as well as the WHO[12] all reviewed the health risks of BPA, and found normal exposure to be below the level currently associated with risk."
If it has some health effects, they've been incredibly hard to actually pin down..
“Normal exposure” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. Presumably having all your daily texts arrive on such paper wouldn’t be “normal exposure,” which if I recall correctly is handling a receipt for a few seconds a day with only your fingertips.
this one time when i was young and dumb and into smoking weed, i remember running out of rolling paper so i rolled a joint using a supermarket receipt i had and smoked it
this was like 20 years ago, still makes me shudder after i learned about the BPA stuff
A few years ago my friend's mother started using medical marijuana for pain management. My friend had to explain that no, you should not make a pipe out of a coke can because of the plastic liner, go to a head shop and buy a glass pipe like a normal person!
> you should not make a pipe out of a coke can because of the plastic liner
I'm fairly sure it doesn't make much of an health impact considering the hot smoke you pull into your lung, but when I was kid and we made pipes out of cans in "emergencies" we'd use the outside of the can as where you put anything with fire, you don't have to turn it inside out to be able to smoke out of it.
Some stoner-engineering could hook up two cans with each other, one is the cup you use for burning the material and the other one the "water-passageway". Obviously not recommended as there is plastic liner on the inside, but in that way you could use the inside :) Basically a bong in two pieces made out of two cans.
You do know that BPA-free just means they use BPS or some other bisphenol plasticizer, right? Right? Because all of the research was focused on BPA and nobody tested BPS even though they're quite similar chemically.
You just can't polymerize plastics without a plasticizer. It's just not allowed by chemistry. No free lunch.
If you want something that's not going to leach huge amounts of plasticizers onto your fingers, use an inkjet or a laser toner printer or a laser marking machine.
They don't really make those for receipts, though, because fingers tend to be wet and powdered toner is expensive.
Pretty much. Same thing with microplastics: sure it may be bad for you, but the average modern lifestyle includes so many other things that we know are much worse (smoking, drinking, factory food, sedentary, soda, …)
at the time, the openai API and the printer max speed capped out at roughly the same time and would use up an entire roll in ~ 10 minutes. if you didn't wind the paper back up it would fill a whole garbage bag.
I have a clockworkPi dev console which has the built-in printer, and it has always been a 'quaint' accessory, but lately I have been looking at it with glee and wondering what strange and fruitful things I could do with it .. the first is of course a zine, for which it is the perfect printing device .. just carry it with me, print out this months issue, stable the whole sizzle together and duct-tape it in some random loo somewhere, as deserves all good zine format ..
So, yeah, there could also be a window of opportunity by which other readers of the zine could send their own message to be included in the distribution channel (i.e. the bog roll) and things could propagate.
Well, I guess the point is, that suddenly I think that receipt printers are really the only printer I want to deal with, ultimately. I've gotta stock up on rolls.
For the many posters recommending BPA free paper - does anyone have suggestions / a link for a reliable seller?
I looked on Amazon after another receipt printer post on HN but couldn’t find anything that provided confidence in the BPA characterization. ULINE is quantities are absurd for personal use. Imagine their most be a decent alternative but never see any named.
Somebody did that back in the 1980s. They put a small printer into a phone that had the same form factor as a Western Electric model 500.[1]
This connected to a PBX and printed "While you were out" slips.
It was a real product, but did not catch on. Anyone remember that thing? I saw ads, but never one in person.
The problem with a production product is refilling all those little rolls of printer paper. They will always run out when no one is available to answer the phone, of course.
My wife has a little thermal camera (Vivitar Instant Camera) that she takes to parties and events. The picture/print quality is a bit better than a gameboy camera, certainly not HD, but also fractions of a cent per picture rather than a dollar like you'd pay for a Polaroid. Fun stuff.
I bought some for my nephews (age 3-4), it's a lot of fun, because it's instant physical feedback.
Also if you buy a pack of BPA-free paper rolls, you get a crazy amount of pictures for $20. Granted you'll have to re-roll them into smaller rolls to fit the camera.
Russian writer Leonid Kaganov had this idea back in 2021, with an added twist that he also put the printer in his bathroom: https://lleo.me/dnevnik/2021/11/30
I'm surprised they didn't mention anything about preventing spam. The biggest thing that deters me from doing something like this is the idea that not long after I opened it up it would get hammered by bots so much that it would make the whole thing unusable.
Maybe tangential, but I just added a little 3-second delay to my stats counter. I’ll find out if that worked for the specific bots I’m trying to avoid in a couple days.
I might have to do this with my printer the Raspberry Pi 400 in my bedroom.
Yes, the use case of receipt printers is really intriguing .. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698598) .. I find myself wondering what other simple micro-printing things might be worth the effort. The offline nature, the anonymity of the reader - this makes it an appealing media, suddenly, in the storm of digital life.
In my case, I will probably try to use my receipt printer as a zine production line. The nature of the format inspires some great article writing ..
Something to note is the impermanence of the final product, as thermal paper does not have longevity (only ~1 year). I have not found a similar solution (printer + media with a similar form factor) where the print lasts longer, so open to suggestions for such use cases. I suppose in the short term, including a QR code in the print job that links to a perma/deep link online might work from a publishing perspective for bookmarking purposes.
Huh, that's very interesting. I've always considered Art to be timeless, bc it is, all of it. Davinci did a lot of cool stuff but the Mona Lisa made him the most famous person and I really don't see that changing. I have a painting hanging over my head rn whose artist died in the 1680s - the painting is over 100 years older than the Declaration of Independence and was brought over here on a ship with sails that took forever.
Impermanent art. That just bothers me.
An artist that dedicates their life to such a thing is like swimming in the fountain of youth without ever taking a drink.
Huh, that's very interesting. I've always considered Art to be timeless, bc it is, all of it. Davinci did a lot of cool stuff but the Mona Lisa made him the most famous person and I really don't see that changing. I have a painting hanging over my head rn whose artist died in the 1680s - the painting is over 100 years older than the Declaration of Independence and was brought over here on a ship with sails that took forever.
Impermanent art. That just bothers me.
An artist that dedicates their life to such a thing is like swimming in the fountain of youth without ever taking a drink.
This is really cool! I sent you an (hopefully) uplifting message for the week’s end. I know I shouldn’t but I really want to buy a receipt printer now!
saw this project on TikTok when it went viral, love both the concept and implementation. the creator could easily overengineer something simple like this, but looks like the Pi stands up well with high load.
the only problem i had with the site itself was actually accessing it - TikTok doesn't "do" links so i kept having to check if i'd spelt their name right!
I have wanted to do experiments with a receipt printer hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, with some simple controls... but every time I look up the cost of the printer I balk. It's probably not fair, but I guess in my head it feels like they should be cheaper. Or at least the cost then makes me question how much time I'm really ready to put into stuff like debugging the printer drivers and putting together a case, etc etc.
The thing I actually want to play with is probably some kind of board game that incorporates the printer... ideally with bar/QR codes so the computer can print out money, IOUs, instructions, etc., and have this computer mediation that still gives people physical items to manipulate.
While not an outright solution to the fact that they _are_ expensive, if you don't care about them being second hand or a little older you can score a pretty good deal on sites like eBay.
For instance, TM-T88V printers can do more but cost around 3x as much as the one I got, a TM-T88IV which is the older version. Not perfect, but beats the like $200 price tag brand new.
Among other things it has very broad printer support and Chinese-Japanese-Korean character support (requires purchasing a model with the chars preloaded). It's still under active development but it references the PHP library the author mentions. This lib is actually used in a many restaurants in Asia.
https://github.com/ValdikSS/printer-driver-funnyprint
I use it to print barcodes, and it's very handy compared to serious enterprise printers: it's lightweight, battery-powered, and works over Bluetooth.
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