I did! I also use gloves when handling a large amount of the receipts.
I worked as a cashier for years in my teens and twenties though, so it’s probably already in my blood.
I mean, over time it would exit right?
It lingers in fat tissue and once at a low enough level your liver doesn't really clear it. But that kind of level isn't necessarily linked to increased risks of diabetes or heart disease.
this one time when i was young and dumb and into smoking weed, i remember running out of rolling paper so i rolled a joint using a supermarket receipt i had and smoked it
this was like 20 years ago, still makes me shudder after i learned about the BPA stuff
A few years ago my friend's mother started using medical marijuana for pain management. My friend had to explain that no, you should not make a pipe out of a coke can because of the plastic liner, go to a head shop and buy a glass pipe like a normal person!
> you should not make a pipe out of a coke can because of the plastic liner
I'm fairly sure it doesn't make much of an health impact considering the hot smoke you pull into your lung, but when I was kid and we made pipes out of cans in "emergencies" we'd use the outside of the can as where you put anything with fire, you don't have to turn it inside out to be able to smoke out of it.
> we'd use the outside of the can as where you put anything with fire, you don't have to turn it inside out to be able to smoke out of it.
This is what I pictured, but now I'm curious how you'd use the inside of the can.
Heating up plastic gives off all kinds of really nasty organic compounds, far worse than the drug... doesn't need to be direct flame.
Fun fact, that extremely thin paper used in bibles is usually hemp paper.
It's Genesis 4:20, you silly
The products of combustion you inhaled are likely far worse.
I mean... the weed was going to get smoked, it was definitely the receipt that was the foreign invader here.
The fact that you did something intentionally doesn't automatically make it less of a mistake.
Any recommendations on where to source BPA-free thermal paper? I've tried to source BPA free shipping labels in the US and found them unobtainable.
I wrote a CUPS (Linux) printer driver for Xiqi cheap ($10) Chinese label printers if anyone interested
https://github.com/ValdikSS/printer-driver-funnyprint
I use it to print barcodes, and it's very handy compared to serious enterprise printers: it's lightweight, battery-powered, and works over Bluetooth.
There was a REALLY cool project by the design firm Berg in the UK about ~13 years ago. Cute little thermal printer with online services that allowed you to have scheduled printouts of things like weather reports, horoscopes, etc.
And... oh my goodness, I was looking for pictures of it and it turns out some kind person decided to put work in on having a way to do onprem services for it! [Check it out here](https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/)
> The team at Berg invested a lot of time developing the visual language and aesthetics of Little Printer, across the physical device and their web service.
Shame they didn't bother to invest any time in making sure their expensive devices wouldn't end up as paperweights. Seriously, it's infuriating that they were lauded for the creativity of this project but it's fallen to hobbyists and volunteers to engineer an entire suite of software to make this dead hardware work again, just because the initial developers were either too lazy, too shortsighted, or too restricted by bean-counters to develop open source (or at least self-hostable) software for these machines. You can't even change the server address of these things without hardware flashing and risking bricking your hub.
I know someone that this would be perfect for, but sadly too niche to have survived. It's a neat idea being able to get little "tickets" for various daily tasks for those that do better with those types of things compared to using a digital calendar
I remember wanting the Berg printer but it was crazy expensive
Yeah we unfortunately are spoiled with mass manufacturing. If they'd been popular enough for them to make a million Berg printers, the price would have been more in line with what we expect.
I have a Star Micronics receipt printer and have a similar setup, and when people in my community used it, it was fun.
And the issue is that, it's only fun as long as you have people using it...
I did write a StarPRNT protocol library for it, but in hindsight, I probably should have used ESC/POS instead.
I've fantasized about fax phone banks for artists to send things out periodically.
The idea of a machine unexpectedly popping out a sheet of paper has gone from "this is all spam" to delightful again.
Physical items in a physical space whereby you call a place and not a person.
We've digitally moved from spaces to individuals and I think that's the main critique of the modern web: somehow networked ourselves but abandoned the networking of ourselves.
You could even do it all digitally somehow and just hook it up to a modern network printer. Whitelisted senders get printed while unrecognized ones enter a digital backlog.
The real desire is to explore the psuedo anonymous nature of the early web in a way that is robust to abuse.
I think the key point that would make this delightful is the whitelist. Lord knows the moment its opened up it'll be spammed with the worst things bored teenagers can find.
BPA/BPS-free thermal paper exists; both chemicals are banned in the EU.
I suspect the author, like nearly all of us here will get more exposure to BPA from handling supermarket (etc.) receipts than from this gimmick.
I typically decline those.
Thermal paper was widely used for fax machines and portable printers years back as well.
Worse: I worked in grocery stores for years as a cashier lol
I did too but the printers were still dot matrix with ink ribbons then.
I'm pretty sure I ate some as a bet in high school.
receipt printers are a blast. at one point i was livestreaming chatgpt talking to humans via a printer: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cr04ofLsxtl/
at the time, the openai API and the printer max speed capped out at roughly the same time and would use up an entire roll in ~ 10 minutes. if you didn't wind the paper back up it would fill a whole garbage bag.
I have a clockworkPi dev console which has the built-in printer, and it has always been a 'quaint' accessory, but lately I have been looking at it with glee and wondering what strange and fruitful things I could do with it .. the first is of course a zine, for which it is the perfect printing device .. just carry it with me, print out this months issue, stable the whole sizzle together and duct-tape it in some random loo somewhere, as deserves all good zine format ..
So, yeah, there could also be a window of opportunity by which other readers of the zine could send their own message to be included in the distribution channel (i.e. the bog roll) and things could propagate.
Well, I guess the point is, that suddenly I think that receipt printers are really the only printer I want to deal with, ultimately. I've gotta stock up on rolls.
I love zine’s. There are tens of us. :)
I'd love to have an impact receipt printer for this so I don't have to source thermal paper etc.
They aren't difficult to find, but they're too expensive for a stupid project like this, which is a glorified fax machine.
My wife has a little thermal camera (Vivitar Instant Camera) that she takes to parties and events. The picture/print quality is a bit better than a gameboy camera, certainly not HD, but also fractions of a cent per picture rather than a dollar like you'd pay for a Polaroid. Fun stuff.
I read the title as "massage me", and was very confused for a few seconds.
Glad I wasn’t the only one.
But knowing the things that pop up on HN, something like remotely massaging someone via a receipt printer is totally believable.
I’m actually hoping someone reads this and creates a remote massaging receipt printer.
Somebody did that back in the 1980s. They put a small printer into a phone that had the same form factor as a Western Electric model 500.[1]
This connected to a PBX and printed "While you were out" slips.
It was a real product, but did not catch on. Anyone remember that thing? I saw ads, but never one in person.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone
I have a rotary phone, a voip adapter, and have been writing a local SIP server for another experiment. I am insanely tempted to replicate this.
Why not, as a fun thing?
The problem with a production product is refilling all those little rolls of printer paper. They will always run out when no one is available to answer the phone, of course.
Which rotary? Classic AT&T?
For the many posters recommending BPA free paper - does anyone have suggestions / a link for a reliable seller?
I looked on Amazon after another receipt printer post on HN but couldn’t find anything that provided confidence in the BPA characterization. ULINE is quantities are absurd for personal use. Imagine their most be a decent alternative but never see any named.
Doesn't know his 3 shells
His printer prolly blowing up right now.
It's kind of nostalgic and make me curious: Were there many magical things like this in the early internet days.
We did this at uni - hpmprinter on twitter and it was on GitHub as twinter :)
I'm surprised they didn't mention anything about preventing spam. The biggest thing that deters me from doing something like this is the idea that not long after I opened it up it would get hammered by bots so much that it would make the whole thing unusable.
Hey it’s me, the author! That was intentional as I honestly enjoy the trolling.
There’s a basic rate limiter set up to prevent misuse, and a character limit, but beyond that I just kind of wanted to see what people would send.
It’s been surprisingly chill, and I’ve only had to handle a few nonsensical text dumps or garbage messages.
How does the rate limiter work? IP?
Maybe tangential, but I just added a little 3-second delay to my stats counter. I’ll find out if that worked for the specific bots I’m trying to avoid in a couple days.
I might have to do this with my printer the Raspberry Pi 400 in my bedroom.
I've wanted to make a project w/ a receipt printer for a little bit now. Does anyone have any good suggestions for printer models?
Yes, the use case of receipt printers is really intriguing .. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698598) .. I find myself wondering what other simple micro-printing things might be worth the effort. The offline nature, the anonymity of the reader - this makes it an appealing media, suddenly, in the storm of digital life.
In my case, I will probably try to use my receipt printer as a zine production line. The nature of the format inspires some great article writing ..
Something to note is the impermanence of the final product, as thermal paper does not have longevity (only ~1 year). I have not found a similar solution (printer + media with a similar form factor) where the print lasts longer, so open to suggestions for such use cases. I suppose in the short term, including a QR code in the print job that links to a perma/deep link online might work from a publishing perspective for bookmarking purposes.
I really have fallen for impermanent art. I display slide/color positive film on my windows. Yup they will fade and that’s totally ok.
This is really cool! I sent you an (hopefully) uplifting message for the week’s end. I know I shouldn’t but I really want to buy a receipt printer now!
They are well within the impulse buy zone, and it’s really easy to programmatically use with Python. Do it!
Wasn't there someone who had printers connected to the internet and a live video stream of the printers printing the messages?
saw this project on TikTok when it went viral, love both the concept and implementation. the creator could easily overengineer something simple like this, but looks like the Pi stands up well with high load.
the only problem i had with the site itself was actually accessing it - TikTok doesn't "do" links so i kept having to check if i'd spelt their name right!
Anyone know where you can buy the wall map shown on the page?
That’s the one! Got it from a local B+N.
That is a good map. So many recognizable names. Not that I'd recognize many, but those which I've searched for, they were present.
I have wanted to do experiments with a receipt printer hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, with some simple controls... but every time I look up the cost of the printer I balk. It's probably not fair, but I guess in my head it feels like they should be cheaper. Or at least the cost then makes me question how much time I'm really ready to put into stuff like debugging the printer drivers and putting together a case, etc etc.
The thing I actually want to play with is probably some kind of board game that incorporates the printer... ideally with bar/QR codes so the computer can print out money, IOUs, instructions, etc., and have this computer mediation that still gives people physical items to manipulate.
I recently bought a thermal ESC/POS printer for 25 Euros on Aliexpress but I saw the sames ones for 30 Euro on Amazon.
I connected it to my linux server and without any drivers I can print with e.g.: `echo "Hello World!" >> /dev/usb/lp0`.
It also supports bar/QR codes.
While not an outright solution to the fact that they _are_ expensive, if you don't care about them being second hand or a little older you can score a pretty good deal on sites like eBay.
For instance, TM-T88V printers can do more but cost around 3x as much as the one I got, a TM-T88IV which is the older version. Not perfect, but beats the like $200 price tag brand new.
You can pick up a Rongta for $75 brand new
I did that once. Spammers found it within 15 minutes.
Were you getting random text? Or actual targeted spam?
For some reason I find it really funny to potentially be getting printed out adverts for shady boner pills or singles near you.
I wonder if you can see what was sent by others
They’re being stored redundantly on a sqlite db. I’ll think about adding some kind of feed to the page if others are interested.
I don’t know, I kind of like having a place for some people to anonymously vent (as more than a few have).
Consider a checkbox whether to be anonymous, which you can filter the feed with.
For those interested I open-sourced library in Ruby which does thermal printing:
https://github.com/tablecheck/thermal/
Among other things it has very broad printer support and Chinese-Japanese-Korean character support (requires purchasing a model with the chars preloaded). It's still under active development but it references the PHP library the author mentions. This lib is actually used in a many restaurants in Asia.