[John] has always loved stock ticker machines. These machines are highly collectible, so short of finding one that wasn’t hurled from a Manhattan skyscraper in 1929, a stock ticker is out of reach for the casual enthusiast. There is another way to get a stock ticker-like device though: hack a label printer to print out stuff from Twitter.
The build is really quite simple. A Dymo thermal label printer was modified to accept standard 2.25″ point of sale receipt paper. Now that the printer can shoot out line after line of text, [John] wrote a little bit of Ruby code using a Twitter API, RMagick for graphics processing and a Dymo printer driver.
Every 30 seconds, the code does a Twitter search for a specific hashtag and prints those tweets. #cookiehammer was the first thing that came to mind, so it stuck. Right now there’s a few tweets for #cookiehammer, but we expect [John] will have to put a new roll of paper in his printer fairly soon.
It may not be as informative as a stock ticker machine, but we think [John]‘s twitter printer build sure beats watching CNN. Check out the walk through after the break.
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I love how the title already created two tweets with that hashtag to be created (@hackaday and @hackadayrss)…
That was the plan.
Cool and all, but why?
Because he can…
i guess you can only use old dymo pritner verisons with that?
anyone know btw if there’s a hack to use the newer generation dymo printers with the non OEM labels?
Actually, this is a brand-new, off the shelf Labelwriter 450 with a USB interface. The drivers code I’m using works just fine.
The song playing in the background is Mt Eden Dubstep – Still Alive
I love that song!
If possible, play that song in the background again in the future.
What text editor is he using? I like the colors and font of the code.
I would say its Notepad++, but not watched the video far enough to tell for sure.
It’s Textmate, the only editor worth switching to OS X for. It’s seriously that good.
John, do you know what font you are using in the video? I want to see if I can duplicate it in something else like Gedit.
I just looked – it’s 12 point Monaco.
dont like thermal printers, scared of BPA
I did something like this two years ago:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfg/sets/72157623026358605/
Completely useless, but kinda funny!
Sweet!
Would you share the code as i saw this and wanted to make something the same but dont know ruby so started to learn and got HTTP Get to work but would like to see your logic.
I posted the code to github at https://github.com/riney/tickertweet-proto
It’s ugly. Don’t judge! :)
–riney