Over the last year or so, there’s been a bit of a trend to get what once was a purely digital news stream and turn it back into paper. The coolest implementation I’ve seen of this trend has been the use of receipt printers – those tiny thermal printers that are ubiquitous in retail shops, quickly printing on long rolls of paper.
Couple a receipt printer with a mini computer and a network connection, and you’ve got your latest news feeds, tweets, instagram pics, and anything else you can imaging on a low-tech piece of paper. A few notable projects:
Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.
You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from — it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special. We have an incredible group of launch partners, and in the run-up to shipping we’re working with them all on custom publications.
Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer
Build an “Internet of Things” connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4″ wide receipt paper. The example sketch we’ve written will connect to Twitter’s search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you’ve gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.
The microprinter is an experiment in physical activity streams and notification, using a repurposed receipt printer connected to the web.
I use it for things like reminders, notifications, and my day at-a-glance, but anything that can be injected from the web and suits text only, short format messaging, will work.
More from Wired:
Your Twitter Feed as Newspaper: A Look at the Tiny Printer Trend | Design | Wired.com.