Posts tagged microprinter
The Internet of Things Assistant is a Ruby on Rails application that can act as a front-end for an Adafruit Internet of Things Printer. It turns your IoT Printer into a handy assistant that will print out snippets of information you tell it to at a certain time each day, or on demand.
Printer appliance that can receive and print SMS, email, and webform messages posted to it on thermal paper.
Sounds familiar.
With all these options the printer is suitable for practically any situation where messages need to be printed easily at a remote location. Some examples include: restaurants to receive orders, taxis to recieve instructions on new pickups and delivery drivers to receive address details.
If anyone enjoys my feeble bloggery here, then they owe it to themselves to read Mike Migurski’s far superior offering, if they aren’t already.
I wrote a simple program in ruby to print out tweets with the hashtag #imwikileaks on my little thermal printer, and ran it for about five minutes.
My desk is completely covered.
Proof of concept:
If you print a URL with a thermal printer, and it fits on one line, with whitespace surrounding it, Google Goggles can find the link and make it clickable.
So if you want to create printable permalinks, QRCodes are nice, but not absoutely necessary.
Fantastic.
Parking Ticket Machine: An Anatomy
Each of these pay-and-display parking ticket machines costs in the region of US$11000, and there are more than 1200 of them around Copenhagen - and all they do is print little slips of paper to allow people to park their cars. An extreme example of “magnificent bits of infrastructure just lying around”.
City ticket to-do lists can include pending issues including expected date by which they will be resolved, recently fixed issues, and local public announcements. This was part of my final thesis project at CIID. See City Tickets for more information.
Repurposing computerized parking-ticket infrastructure for hyperlocal maps and civic engagement.
See City Tickets for more information.
Pay-and-display parking ticket machines are an example of an intensely technological piece of infrastructure. This project explores how we can use these ubiquitous and expensive boxes to make cities more responsive to the needs of those who live in them, and proposes a service through which ticket machines become a communication channel between citizens and their local authorities. By taking functions that may otherwise be found on websites or interacted with through mobile devices, and physically embedding them directly in the urban fabric, City Tickets democratises access and input to municipal services and brings that dialogue to where it is most relevant and powerful: here and now.
City Tickets makes the bureaucratic and opaque workings of governance more transparent and accountable, while redefining the balance of power supporting participatory urban planning and management processes. Updating current machines to also issue city tickets in addition to existing parking tickets allows this existing infrastructure, without the inclusion of any costly additional technology, to be reconsidered as a way to make neighbourhoods more liveable and cities more responsive to the needs and desires of their inhabitants.
(Emphasis mine.)
Hyperlocal maps, civic engagement, use of existing technological infrastructure. Intensely clever.
BERG London, Timo Arnall, and Dentsu London produced two films on “alternative futures” for media. They’re short, well-edited, and thoughtful.
Media surfaces: Incidental Media
The first video suggests a rich set of non-interruptive ways to display contextual data. To gracefully, “ignorably” present information that can be glanced at.
In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention, these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalising on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives.
Compare the presence of a clock dial or barometer —silent, present, non-intrusive— with the chiming barrage of pop-up notification windows on the iPhone. The one asks nothing of you, while the other practically demands an intervention.
(“OH HI! YOU WEREN’T DOING ANYTHING, RIGHT? SOMEONE JUST TOLD YOU ‘LOL’ ON TWITTER ISN’T THAT GREAT?! OK CANCEL”)
Media Surfaces suggests that our choice is not between abstention from social media or surrender to constant intrusion. Instead, we can make thoughtful choices about how and where to present timely, relevant, ignorable (again) messages.
One presentation medium is print, in the form of a microprinter.
This sequence shows a common receipt from a coffee shop and explores what happens when we treat print as a highly flexible, context-sensitive, connected surface, and super quick by contrast to say video in broadcast.
I couldn’t get the QRCode on the receipt to scan, and so am left to wonder what you might use it for in this context. Would it let you “check in” to a location-based site? Search for geotagged photos nearby? Could you easily take one and add it to the set?
The next video focuses on a train journey, and the opportunities to provide glance-able information in order to make the experience calmer and more satisfactory.
Like the first, it is short and well worth watching.
Naturally, one part that made me smile with pure joy involved the use of a ticket printer.
…looking at all the printed ephemera around us and how it can be treated as a media surface for more personalised, contextualised or rapidly-updated information.
After all, most of the printed matter associated with a train journey is truly print-on-demand…
Given an awareness of the time-table of the train ride, and the geography of the country traveled through, BERG create a kind of non-digital, printed augmented reality with ticket stubs:
We know that we’re going to be passing certain places at certain times, to some accuracy, during our journey.
The burgeoning amount of geo-located data about our environment means we could look to provide snippets from Wikipedia perhaps, with timings based on how they intersect with your predicted journey time – alerting you to interesting sights just as they pass by your window.
Think of how humane a medium this is. I’d love to see more exploration of opportunities for bionic noticing while keeping your phone in your pocket and your attention out of a tiny screen.
I wonder if we could somehow entice Matt or anyone else from the BERG crew to Boston for a PaperCamp…
rabbits (by Colm McMullan)
Nabaztag and microprinter.
Really regret not getting a nabaztag while they were in business…
Papernet Design Pattern: Microprinters
Print small bits of online data from a web service or mobile device, without drivers, formatting, or special software on the client
Ben O’Steen’s MP Expense visualization parses a Google Spreadsheet and generates receipts, which are linked back to the source material via a QRCode.
Use for printing a stream of data (such as a twitter hashtag, @replies to a user, etc.) without human intervention
Use as a networked printer for links, triggered by a call to a web service — as in the instapaper bookmarklet
Use when the output is intended to be ephemeral (e.g. directions to the pub you’re meeting at, to be crumpled and tossed when you arrive)
Use when you want to collect data in real time and display it in a non-interruptive manner
Use when you want offline access to important information in situations where use of a smartphone or tablet may be awkward, inappropriate, or difficult
Use when the data to be printed is textual or graphically simple (e.g. a sparkline graph or QRCode)
An arduino and RS232-serial interface connect to the serial port on a simple thermal-paper printer. The arduino uses an ethernet shield to poll a custom hosted web service; the service receives the data to be printed and formats, then queues that data for the arduino. When the arduino receives a positive response from the service, it magic to receive the data, then prints to the thermal printer.
From a user’s perspective, what happens is, when a certain set of criteria is met — a URL has been passed to a service via some mechanism such as email or a bookmarklet, or new data has appeared on an external service such as Google Alerts, Twitter, Tumblr, RSS feeds, etc. — the microprinter prints a slip of flimsy thermal paper with the information on it.
A microprinter provides a physical output mechanism for digital data. It’s not so much a finished product as a sketch that points at a pattern: the low-friction way to produce little tangible icons of digital data.
(via sketchcards)
