Hi guys, thanks so much for all the love you're showing our thermal printer project! As you've probably seen, the sudden HN traffic has been a bit overwhelming for our site.
I'm with Good Enough, a small collective of six friends. We're not venture backed, and our guestbook is really just a little art project. We honestly made it for the fun of it, and it's not for profit, and it wasn't designed to scale. :)
Please take it easy on our little printer! And do take a moment admire all the lovely drawings people all around the world have created. Each print has to be manually scanned in (I put the prints over old comics and scan them in on a flatbed scanner), so it'll take a while for today's drawings to show up on the gallery.
The technology behind it is quite cool and you can read about it here: https://guestbook.goodenough.us/info (Sorry, but the site might be slow right now...)
And if you're curious about our other work, here's our site: https://goodenough.us Thanks again, and hope the rest of your day is fantastic!
Seems like it would be easier long-term to just keep a copy of what the browser sends to your server, then display that instead of the scanned print itself.
Even if you generate the printer bytestream in the browser and just `cat` whatever comes in to your printer device, it would probably be faster (again, long-term) to write software which can render that data stream to an image.
but as an art project, it's perfect. is the source code anywhere?
I've been talking with a few friends as well about forming a group quite similar to this - can I ask how it went or what was the initial motivation for everyone to finally do it? Are you all having backgrounds in software or do other people on the team have engineering / hardware / other focuses? Absolutely love stuff like this - subscribed to the newsletter! Cheers!
James Adam was the genius behind the whole project. There's been efforts to make networked thermal printers in the past, like the Berg printer: https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/
The guestbook images load very very slowly. Probably because they are quite a bit larger than their preview boxes and also PNG.
Simply re-encoding with mozjpeg at 85% (which still looks darn good to my eyes) without rescaling in case you wanted the larger size for retina displays.
$ ~/git/mozjpeg/cjpeg -quality 85 ge-printer-231017-zenwheel.png > temp.jpeg
$ ls -lh temp.jpeg ge-printer-231017-zenwheel.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 nemo nemo 439K Oct 18 19:04 ge-printer-231017-zenwheel.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 nemo nemo 77K Oct 19 09:20 temp.jpeg
Aaand reduced a touch so it still should look good on HD, and cranking up the jpeg compression slightly.
Opened stream, immediately saw goatse, you might want to detour `drawImage` and booby trap it to ban anyone using it on the canvas (this is what another website did for a similar project).
This used to be a fax machine "prank"/DoS-- put black construction paper into the hopper, then tape the out end to the in end as it emerges so it forms a "drum" of black paper that continuously feeds.
Fax that to someone and it ties up the phone line while wasting all the receiver's ink and paper.
In my experience yes. Old receipt roles fade even stored in a warehouse.
I would try that anyway, as an experiment.
A cheap thermal printer for kids is around 10-20 USD (got one for such price with 10 rolls of paper, half of which is sticky paper), has bluetooth, usb and battery. Fits in a pocket. Would be fun to stick such qr code inside some not important book left lying around.
Others comment that thermal prints don't last long, but that's all dependent on the print material. The typical receipt fades after a couple of months, but Brother has small label printers that are often used in archiving and those labels can last for decades.
So just take some time to find the right medium for your needs and thermal printers can be a decent option.
One type of brother label printer (the ones that take "tze" cartridges) are thermal transfer printers, which last very well. They transfer pigment from a separate ribbon, rather than chemically change the label.
Do these require a specific software to be able to print or can they take anything and just print? Like, is it a regular driver, could I connect to this brother printer from my iPhone?
the one i've got (brother p-touch) seems to require a proprietary software suite, but i haven't really put any effort into figuring out whether there's an alternative way to print to it.
it definitely does not "just work", it's not detected as a printer in windows.
A small thermal printer would probably be direct thermal, which uses a heat head and heat sensitive coated paper. This fades away naturally, even if kept in the dark. Glue from tape will accelerate it, in case you're thinking about it to protect from abrasion.
There's also thermal transfer printers, which use a ribbon as "ink", similar to typewritter. These labels can endure much harder conditions, like scratches, high temperatures and fade. They're used all over the industry. But these aren't usually small printers and have a high cost. At that point I think you have better solutions on printing services (I understand if you don't want to have the files outside of your environment, though.)
1000 bytes is also a huge QR code. Sure, you can do it, but I'd bet that scanning it will be very hard and impossible with some apps where that usecase hasn't been tested.
It says a QR code is specified as being up to 177 pixels wide (and high I presume, because square), where they can have 2 kB of data with medium error correction.
It's a bit of a chore, but manageable to do if the data is important enough. Plus, with error correction built in, you can make some mistakes.
Funnily enough I'm doing something similar, but QR codes don't quite work out because their density is not enough for me (even after compression..), I've been printing using a laser printer and a software called PaperBack from the OllyDBG guy! It works surprisingly well for backing up data in paper.
You could draw it by hand; get some grid paper and a pen or marker, copy the QR code from your screen. There's plenty of error correction in a QR code that you could make some mistakes, I believe.
I've had an open doodle program at https://max.io/bash.html for 10 years. About 5 years ago I realized all the shared doodles went into the nginx logs as urls. So I extracted them to see what people were drawing. 90% phalluses.
Everybody acts surprised about this, but nobody bothers to cater to what is clearly an underserved market of men who want to draw and exchange crude drawings of penises.
Rename the app to "Gloryhole" and watch as all interest evaporates despite explicit permission.
Kinda like the old oekaki boards, eh? Forums where you drew your posts with tools embedded on the page. The pen here ought to draw without anti-aliasing for authenticity ;)
This forum had no text entry! All comments were handwritten and drawn. Its last days saw what might be the most expressive biddings of farewell ever posted on the web: http://archive.tewi.us/tegaki/sortbytag.php?t=1&p=2
Is it a coincidence both sites are Touhou-themed? What we can see is that the second had a lot of tumblr users...
Right! 4chan still has an oekaki board, one of two boards with special UI. The editor (tegaki.js) records lossless replays as proof that posts are original. Fitting the theme, you can watch a Reimu being drawn here in 39m51s: https://boards.4chan.org/i/thread/699320#p737995
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That kind of linework with no anti-aliasing is something special when displayed unscaled at the right DPI. I think it's the crispness that makes it pop. Same with Easytoon animation: 1-bit 160x120 GIF can look this good? (https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts?tags=easytoon_%28medium%29+...)
Not sure how this is hooked up, but there can be quite a bit of heat generated if it's possible for people to print (lots of) fully black pages, like wasting someone's fax toner/ink but with a risk of fire.
Receipt printers are thermal and they print all day long.
Thermal printers use a thin wire that heats up in certain sections. The paper is heat sensitive. Funny though I discovered you can erase a thermal image using a highlighter pen (at old job where clerks had to highlight a section. Ooops!)
The paper is probably more of a danger since thermal paper supposedly is loaded with BPA.
Recently bought that same printer on Temu for like $5 so this is very interesting.
Would love to connect it to something allowing me to control it remotely.
They're designed to be able to print solid black. Some printers even have an 'invert' mode which prints white on black. It doesn't look very good though (uneven), which is why it's rarely done.
I went on a bit of an odysee creating "smart" thermal printers this summer in an attempt to build something suitable for giving Bitcoin payment notifications to merchants.
I started with battery-powered Bluetooth-enabled printers but found that the ESP32 microcontroller I was working with had trouble connecting to both WiFi and Bluetooth at the same time.
I ended up going with another printer model that supported TTL serial connections and landed on the ESP32 C3 board which has a very small form factor and was able to squeeze inside the case that comes with the printer.
It appears I'm about five hours late on the internet hug of death you guys are experiencing. Looking forward to reading when I can access it :) Congrats on making something interesting enough to cause you this pain.
Hey folks, the live stream of doodles is shut down for now.
While some of you created some really beautiful doodles, or silly doodles, or both doodles, some other folks decided it was a great place to spew racist and vile imagery, and it's not right that we broadcast that back into the world.
There's definitely some internet rule out there that states as soon as users can submit artwork to some publicly visible forum, racism and nsfw imagery will show up.
Thanks for this project though, it's pretty neat :)
Remember when the #Agile2013 conference told people their tweets at that hashtag would be displayed in public? and 4chan jumped to help? Internet Historian remembers: https://youtu.be/ROaj3bCpZEM
It was pretty recently in history, it really took a long time for everyone to establish settled rules of the internet.
var c=document.getElementById('imageView'),ctx=c.getContext('2d'),i=new Image();i.onload=function(){ctx.drawImage(i,0,0,c.width,c.height);};fetch('your-image-url').then(response=>response.blob()).then(blob=>{var r=new FileReader();r.onloadend=function(){i.src=r.result};r.readAsDataURL(blob)});
Same here on my Android phone running Bromite. As a workaround, you can switch to the eraser tool and then back everytime you lift your pen/finger — although its not really ideal ^^'
Lmao I love this. Is there a collection of these sorts of real-time experiments? Every so often a remote control robot to printer will come up on here/back in the day Slashdot/Reddit/Fark and it's loads of fun. I remember having a great time as a kid trying to flip the Plantraco remote control car by driving up the corner of the wall
I'm with Good Enough, a small collective of six friends. We're not venture backed, and our guestbook is really just a little art project. We honestly made it for the fun of it, and it's not for profit, and it wasn't designed to scale. :)
Please take it easy on our little printer! And do take a moment admire all the lovely drawings people all around the world have created. Each print has to be manually scanned in (I put the prints over old comics and scan them in on a flatbed scanner), so it'll take a while for today's drawings to show up on the gallery.
The technology behind it is quite cool and you can read about it here: https://guestbook.goodenough.us/info (Sorry, but the site might be slow right now...)
And if you're curious about our other work, here's our site: https://goodenough.us Thanks again, and hope the rest of your day is fantastic!