Comment by mrshawnliu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrshawnliu | Hacker News Reader

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!

> Each print has to be manually scanned in

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?

We can indeed do that, but as you correctly identify, a purely-digital copy would undermine the aesthetic :)

The code for the guestbook is not open source, but it's built on this open-source platform: https://github.com/exciting-io/printer

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!

Hi there, you can read more about the technical background here: https://guestbook.goodenough.us/info

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/

And James has an open-source project here that you might be interested in: https://github.com/exciting-io/printer

The rest of us don't have hardware experience. Four of us can code, one of us is on more of the UI side of things, and I do some doodles for the team.

Cool idea, was wondering if you could automate taking a photo of the thermal paper as it comes out of the printer, using a camera.

I got a little digital camera from aliexpress that's quite fun, as it has an in-built thermal printer.

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