Everything has a period in age, where it becomes interesting, as it’s no longer old “crap” but “cool old crap”

See typewriters, they’re to most, old crap.

But Camcorders ? Walkmans ? iPods? They’re in the correct threshold for “cool”

To me? Thermal printers are cool. Eventually they won’t be, but for now? Cool.

I recently bought one of these: https://learn.adafruit.com/mini-thermal-receipt-printer

I had the bright idea of making messages print from my website.

Not this website, the top level of this site, willx86.com

Only accessible via SSH, I felt like it was the right place to put it.

Try it :)

ssh willx86.com

You’ll be prompted with a very intelligent question:

After the objectively correct answer, you’ll see a “message me” on the bottom right, press ‘m’, type your message and it’ll get printed over at my desk.

It’ll look something like this:

How it works

• My personal ssh website is made via https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish
• I take a text input
• This adds it to an in-memory store.
• A http router is created
• A Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32-C3 sends a “GET” request every ~5s
• If there’s a message, it’s removed from the in-memory store, printed on my desk

A few notes:

• I’m not providng an image of the esp32, not because it looks like a fire risk. But 100% because it looks like a fire risk.
• Bastard printer requires 2A 9V, I had to use a power cord from a broken dehumidifier to use it.
• Some thermal printers speak alien, it’s probably an incorrect baud rate.