Guten: A Tiny Newspaper Printer

[figbert]

Made something similar that is probably my proudest work: https://figbert.com/projects/roll-call/

I increasingly have come to believe that it is the screen itself that lies at the root of the ills of technology. It brings so much benefit—and so much convenience, from its flexibility—but it is in its fundamental glow-y rectangular nature that sucks us in, crushing our attention, posture, and so much else. Was incredibly fun to experiment with something radically different.

Excited to see where things go from here.

[Neywiny]

If this is your website, as a heads up it doesn't work well on my browser. Firefox on Android, I believe I have a dark mode and the text is still black but on a very dark background.

[fmajid]

Nice! I got an Epson TM-m30II PoS printer on a whim, and haven’t really found a use for it yet, I’ll definitely try your script.

[iamjackg]

I've had this same idea since I also own a thermal printer, but I could never get past the wastefulness of printing a piece of paper that I would then immediately throw away after reading, so I never implemented it. I still think about it periodically: there is something oddly alluring about finding a small piece of paper made specifically for me whenever I go to the kitchen in the morning. E-ink just doesn't quite feel the same.

[notpushkin]

I wanna buy a dot-matrix printer for projects like that. Still would be wasting paper but at least it won’t be toxic and the result is usually more aesthetically pleasing IMO.

[captn3m0]

I've been wanting to build something similar, but can't get myself to buy a thermal print for just this project. I'll probably settle with a "Sunday Newspaper" as a compromise on my laserjet printer.

[pxoe]

Feels like the vibe from tech scolds in general has shifted towards "fun is wasteful". Oh well.

[agumonkey]

we should have miniaturized 80s electrostatic screen for that

[fnordian_slip]

Yeah, I kind of expected this to be an art project decrying the wastefulness of our times, not an actual project.

[amanvir_]

Hey, I'm the creator of Guten!

Thank you, OP, for posting this, and thanks to the community for all your support!

To answer some common questions/comments/concerns:

- Totally agree with the sentiment regarding screens being a big problem in today's day and age. The main reason I wanted to make Guten was so that I could start my day off reading something on paper instead of staring at my phone. It also helps that you can't doomscroll on a receipt ;)

- I also love Little Printer - it seemed like such a cool product, but I unfortunately never had the chance to purchase one before it got discontinued. This is my attempt to bring back some of the functionalities in Little Printer that I'd find most useful in my day-to-day.

- BPA in thermal paper was a concern of mine as well, but I thankfully found some BPA-free thermal paper on Amazon!

[Aloha]

Epson still makes a two color impact printer as well in this form factor.

https://epson.com/For-Work/POS-System-Devices/POS-Printers/T...

I'd be very interested in a "supply your own printer" version of this as well - either using these two color printers or thermal.

I suspect there isnt a ton of money to be made in selling printers, but rather the aggregation services needed to drive it. Let people buy a commodity printers, or a variety of them - if you use CUPS as an abstraction layer, you can basically run anything, and the CUPS turns the actual output device into an abstraction.

[fmajid]

French company Exacompta makes a line of BPA-free and sustainable thermal receipt paper: https://www.exacompta.com/en/recherche?search=Thermal The EU banned BPA in receipt paper since 2020, so any European supplier should work.

[CarRamrod]

>BPA in thermal paper was a concern of mine as well, but I thankfully found some BPA-free thermal paper on Amazon!

Cheers to that. A note about buying BPA-free thermal paper on the site might be nice, especially for those who plan to have children interact with your project.

[nakedrobot2]

Yeah it's the bpa more than the waste that would bother me.

Honest question, isn't the bpa free paper just using something else than bpa that is unregulated and potentially even worse?

[phyrex]

Please be aware that handling thermal paper is super unhealthy: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5453537/

[smartmic]

Not necessarily, if you choose a friendly alternative. In Germany, we have https://www.oekobon.de/ , I guess there a similar offers for other markets. As always, there are downsides. In this case, the eco version comes with a blue base color.

[declan_roberts]

There's a reason why a lot of the Costco receipt checkers wear nitrile gloves now.

[sleepybrett]

This same project has been done several times. Most notably by BERG London https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/

This thing came out right on the cusp of IOT as a concept, They put a lot of nice effort into design. You could configure it for some predefined blocks of content and also some support for rss. Was nice to have a little actual pen and paper sodoku every morning on the bus.

[apgwoz]

This looks cool! Reminds me of the long defunct Little Printer (https://vimeo.com/32796535).

[simonw]

Yeah, Little Printer may also serve as a warning that turning this kind of thing into a commercial endeavor is a very challenging road!

You should be OK if you do the Kickstarter style of thing, take pre-orders etc - but I would be wary about raising investment for this kind of project.

[CarRamrod]

Very cool, but FYI, many types of thermal paper contain extremely high levels of the chemical BPA.

[macinjosh]

You’re not supposed to eat/lick/consume it.

[dqv]

What's the deal with the thermal paper though? I guess it's negligible exposure since you would only be using it once a day. There is an alternative thermal paper that uses vitamin c. It's slightly more expensive but I feel like that wouldn't matter for something like this since it's not using nearly as much as would be used for retail printing. I wonder if it's worth using the vitamin c kind instead.

[arminiusreturns]

Based on some of my reading on the current thermal paper, we really need a safer alternative.

If you deal with receipts many times in a day you should be wearing gloves!

[feisuzhu]

I'm using a [Gprinter GP-1324D](https://www.ebay.com/itm/365264659480) in everyday work, printing task tracking stickers, various labels, etc. It's designed to print shipping labels / recipients in business scenarios so it's fairly robust. The only con I can think of is its physical size. I'm not familiar with eBay, but on Xianyu(Chinese second hand market app), yes you can buy one using only $20, shipping included.

[feisuzhu]

Linux CUPS driver here: https://github.com/feisuzhu/gprinter-cups

[smarx007]

This is even better as it allows you to glue the printouts on a diary page instead of discarding them, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kMFWM64gVQ

[quartermaster]

This reminds me of Little Printers from a few years ago: https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/

Nice to see the concept is still alive and useful!

[graypegg]

I’ve wanted to make something like this for a while! Though with sudoku puzzles instead of news. My mum goes thru tons of those sudoku books, and doesn’t want to use her phone for it. Just a button to get 1 puzzle, or hold for a roll of 10 or something seems like an easy thing to set up.

[salgernon]

adafruit used to sell a little pi powered thermal printer[1] but I always found the case a little fiddly and fragile. And my office mate didn’t care for the thing coming on at random times. (Not as bad as the text only 40 col commercial receipt printer that used actual ink and was as loud as a full size Epson MX-80.

Free idea: Uber for printers. Need to print something? Car drives up with a printer in the boot, you print whatever (umbrella as appropriate) and the driver is responsible for ink and paper.

[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/717

[ornornor]

I cant imagine how much it would cost per print. I doubt anyone would be willing to pay 5–10$ for the first page. It’s cheaper to drive to a print shop or send your pdf to a printing service and receive hard copies by mail.

[deanputney]

Before I bought a printer for home, I'd go print things at my local library. Pretty convenient, and it was free for 10 b/w pages a week! But getting my own used Brother printer was a real step up.

[mediumsmart]

This is great for the environment. Millions of people could balance the strain they put on the planet by reading the news from their lithium powered Gadgets on good old paper. Win win

[latexr]

Most thermal paper is made with harmful chemicals.

[Instantnoodl]

Always happy to see other thermal printer projects :D

I have my own project for using these for TTRPGs: https://sales-and-dungeons.app/

[alekratz]

Hey, I made something like this last year. It wasn't a self-contained unit, it was just a receipt printer with a script that would run every morning at 8am, getting the forecast, word of the day, and quote of the day. The idea was that if something important happened that day, I could hold onto that day's slip of paper and maybe write a note on it? I dunno, I stopped using after a month or so.

[eggy]

After my PET 2001 I had purchased in 1977/78, I bought a Commodore Vic-20. Using the book, "Practical Astronomy with Your Calculator", I wrote a program in Vic BASIC which was the same as the PET's to identify the four most prominent moons of Jupiter based on their elliptical plane being on edge when viewed from Earth. I wanted a way of going on my roof in Brooklyn with my small refractor to identify them, so I bought a thermal printer and printed out the primitive graphics on a line for a given time for the next few hours or so of stargazing. I can't remember the printer brand, but it wasn't one of the Apple, Atari, or ZX offerings. Good fun. I have to say, I would use my phone nowadays or my e-ink tablet instead. Not from being 'sucked in' but merely because it would be quick and more accurate and have other uses for the same task like Stellarium!

[louismerlin]

Fun! A friend of mine has been working on something similar: https://www.wintermute.org/project/The_Screenless_Office/

[irs]

This is cool. Please make it so its not just for news and developer friendly so it can print any content on demand using api. Tried to use a "memobird" printer for similar purpose but couldn't get any support for their API.

[syndicatedjelly]

You can write your own script to do this. It's a few lines of scripting to query whatever APIs you want, and then output to /dev/usb0 or wherever the printer is hooked up. Seems a bit unnecessary to add an extra API wrapper just to do that

You can test this right now by running `echo "Hello, world!" > /dev/usb0`, assuming a printer is connected to that USB port of your Unix-based device.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/141016/a-laymans-ex...

[bwoodward]

I've wanted something like this since the days of TinyPrinter, but I just can't justify thermal printing. I'd love to have either impact or laser, however.

I mostly want it for lists and recipes, but some other goodies would be fun, too.