Printer: an open source kit for exploring internet-of-things printing

gofreerange.com

34 points·tomstuart··10 comments

Somebody asked for a live stream - http://www.ustream.tv/channel/freerange-printer

Send a message or a picture using the demo apps

http://printer-mail.herokuapp.com/send/freerange

http://printer-paint.herokuapp.com/send/freerange

You can poke around the source on github: http://github.com/freerange/printer

There's also some fairly comprehensive documentation on the github wiki, including an architectural overview, and building your own printer: http://github.com/freerange/printer/wiki

James, I met you a couple weeks ago in the pub with Chris Roos. I would love to come over and check this out. Looks dope!

That would be great! Just send us an email and we'll figure out a good time.

So this is an open source BERG Cloud? http://bergcloud.com/ (aka receipt printer)

I suspect that BERG have much grander plans for BERG Cloud than this, and of course BERG Cloud will be much more polished and suitable for normal people. But that said, it's a tool that might help explore a similar 'space' of possibilities, yeah.

How much does an appropriate printer cost? eBay seems to indicate between $100-$300.

The actual printer unit I'm using (i.e. not including the Arduino components) is $50/£40 and is increasingly available:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/600 http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10438 http://proto-pic.co.uk/thermal-printer/

See https://github.com/freerange/printer/wiki/Making-your-own-pr... for more information...

I wonder if you could print to this using a Rasberry Pi with a Gertboard?

You definitely could, and it would be much easier to write the HTTP client code on a Raspberry Pi than it is on the Arduino!

If you look at the Arduino code (https://github.com/freerange/printer/blob/master/printer.ino), all it does is download a stream of bytes, doing some very rudimentary validation (Content-length), and then sending the bytes out on a serial port.

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