Getting the daily news from a dot matrix printer @aschmelyun

Andrew recently purchased a dot matrix printer from eBay, and thought it would be a great excuse to have a custom “news front page” printed out and ready each day. In a recent post, Andrew shows how to set it up, and the PHP script that powers it all.

The printer I purchased was a Star NP-10 from what looks like the mid-80’s. I can’t be 100% sure, but any dot matrix printer with a serial port should do the trick. The prices range from about $80-120 USD, but I was able to get this one for about half that price because it was marked as “unsure if working”.

I hooked everything up. The Raspberry Pi is connected to my WiFi, and then via USB to the serial port of the printer. After turning on the printer and sshing into the Pi, I can verify that the printer is available at /dev/usb/lp0.

I wanted to remain super cheap for this data, free if at all possible. Thankfully there’s an amazing GitHub repo for free and public APIs, so I just went through there and found the ones I needed.

  • The weather pulls from Open-Meteo and no API key is needed
  • Stocks data pulls from twelvedata that offers a generous free tier
  • News headlines pull from NYTimes which has a decent free tier, good enough for this project
  • Reddit posts pull from Reddit JSON which is free (but I had to spoof my User-Agent)

Check out more in the post here.


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