blog/content/Articles/littleprynter/index.md

categories	title	displayInMenu	dropCap	description	date	draft	displayInList	resources
English	Little Prynter	false	false	I've reinvented the fax : why, how, and why you could do it yourself too.	2022-07-24	true	true	name src featuredImage cover.jpg

A few years ago, a friend of mine showed me the Little Printer, created by Berg Inc. I loved the ideal of having what was more a less a fax machine, that I could use to print out anything for very very cheap. It's based on a thermal printer, so it doesn't use any ink, and the paper is the same you would use to print out receipts. The issue was that it cost nearly 300€ (!), and that was way too much money for something that was a gimmic.

Moreover, it was pretty limited : it was tied to a proprieatry cloud system, and what I feard back then became true. Berg stopped supporting the Little Printer, and the whole ecosystem was now ready to become trash.

Thankfully, the Nord Projects design studio hacked it back to life, and wrote a new app ecosystem for it. But it's cumbersome to setup, and getting your hands on the original Little Printer isn't easy.

A more personnal quarrel I have with designers is perfectly represented in the Little Printer project : It's a very beautiful object, but it's severly limited by it's design. You are expected to use it as a Little Printer, even after it's death. Using it in another setting is difficult because it's fragile. You can't really sell it or repurpose it once you've grown board with it. You would need to explain how to set it up, bring the little IoT box with it, etc...

I still liked the idea.

Another friend, whom I was visiting, had a thermal printer in his box of things-that-gather-dust and was happy to lend it to me so I could try it out. I started to build my own Little Printer.

I wanted to build something KISS ( Keep It Super Simple ), easy to replicate, and that I could eventually build on over the years. Using existing components and combining them together in a way that was easy to reverse was also a priority. I had a Raspberry Pi, a computer running Linux, a USB webcam, and a Adafruit Thermal Printer.

The first thing was to learn how to use the thermal printer.

Thankfully, Adafruit has tutorial on how to build a polaroïd camera with a thermal printer, which I followed and built a first version of the little printer. It was nice, but had a few issues :

• The printer was super cheap, and wasn't very reliable. It often printed gibberish, and needed to be restarted.
• It only had a serial connection, and it wasn't possible to know when the paper ran out.
• The library I was using hadn't been updated in ages, and needed a CUPS driver dowloaded from a random chinese website. I tried using newer forks, but they didn't seem to fix the problems mentionned above.

Even with theses issues, I knew that thermal printing was a cool tech, and I could use it for a lot of my other printing and propaganda projects. So I started looking for another thermal printer.

I eventually setteld on an EPSON TM20-III, which is around 250€. Nearly the same prince as a LittlePrinter, but it has Ethernet, a standard-ish protocol, USB, two sizes of paper, a cutting blade, 300 dpi resolution, and prints so fast that when you fuck up the orientation of the print, before you can stop it, it already printed 3 meters of paper. In a word, it's perfect. I then bought 4 kilometers of paper for around 50€.

I wanted to write the software in Python, because I found a very nice library for ESC/POS, the standard used by the EPSON printers. I also had built software with Flask, a python web framework, and I loved the design style and the ease it gave to build APIs.

After a few days of hacking, I finally had a complete photomaton that could be accessed from anywhere, printed anything for dirt cheap, and that I could easly extend.

There was Little Prynter.

A few pictures to show it off ;

I also paid attention to the git repository I was writing this code to, and I provide instructions on how to set it up if you want to. You can find it all here : Little Prynter @ git.n07070.xyz.