I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer

Summary

My friend Sam has a feature on his website where you can send him an anonymous message and it'll be delivered to his phone. I liked the concept and wanted something similar on my site, but a bit more physical than just a push notification. Situated at the corner of my desk is a receipt printer that I've used for other projects, so I figured that would make the perfect platform for short-form messages. So I built it! ➡️ ping.aschmelyun.com A page on my personal website where you can type up a message, and as soon as you hit send it's delivered and printed out right on my desk. Your browser does not support the video tag. Here I'll go over how I set it up, how I'm communicating with this printer, some of the limitations I hit, and honestly just how surprisingly cool everyone was with the responses I've gotten so far. If you want to watch this as a video instead, you can find it here on my YouTube channel. The hardware Let's talk first about the printer, and what I have it hooked up to. This is my Epson TM-T88IV thermal receipt printer, and I got it off of eBay for about $50 USD. If you don't know how these work, it's pretty fascinating. Receipt paper is coated in a substance that reacts to heat. So instead of using ink to print, the print head heats up small areas of this paper line-by-line. This basically means that as long as the print head is functional, you'll never have to replace ink cartridges or ribbons. In order to communicate with the printer, I need to send it commands in a specific format known as ESC/POS, a proprietary language that all (or, most?) Epson printers can understand. Now unfortunately because of this printer's age, I can't get driver files for it. If I plug it in to my daily driver (a Mac Mini), the device itself is just totally unrecognized by my computer. I can instead use some kind of intermediary hardware to handle communication that's more lax with peripherals. I chose a Raspberry Pi 4 that I had laying around, and the receipt printer is ...