Spamming A Label Printer With #cookiehammer

[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.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQrhODI4PVM&w=470]

21 thoughts on “Spamming A Label Printer With #cookiehammer

    1. You can actually get BPA free thermal paper for around the same, if not only slightly higher, price as regular thermal paper. In fact, most thermal paper is BPA free now

  1. 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.

  2. Really nice project.
    How to trick the printer not to say OUT OF PAPER,
    Every time I use a different type of paper other than the one with black marks on the back and holes I get the, OUT OF PAPER warning.

    Thanks
    Alex

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