[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]
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
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
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
Im happy that dymo releases sdk for their printer drivers and etc. Gonna hack my new 450 soon… And my rhino5200 may too be under the screwdriver… ;)
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
Same problem here. Also the link you provided to the Dymo driver is not working anymore.