Paper Console – Handmade thermal printer for news, weather, notes, more

Hi HN, I built a thermal printer appliance out of walnut and brass. Turn a dial to pick a channel, press a button, and it prints what you need on 58mm receipt paper. No screen.

Background: I spent six years as a furniture maker before moving into design and development. This is where those worlds finally came together.

The idea started in three places. I wanted a way to get weather and headlines without reaching for my phone first thing in the morning. I wanted something hackable that other developers could customize to fit their life and routines. And I also wanted something simple enough that my grandma, who can't use a smartphone, could use to get the weather, or have family send her messages and useful info throughout the day.

There are 16 modules so far, across three categories: - Content (weather, news, RSS, email, calendar, astronomy, quotes, journal prompts, fact of the day) - Games (sudoku, mazes, a choose-your-own-adventure) - Utilities (text notes, QR codes, webhooks, system monitor).

You assign any combination of those to 8 channels on the rotary dial.

Design: - No cloud dependency. API keys are stored locally, the device makes no outbound connections on its own. - No subscriptions. You bring your own API keys for services like NewsAPI. Everything else runs offline. - The settings UI is password-protected and only accessible on your local network. - Many modules work completely offline: sudoku, mazes, quotes, journal prompts, the adventure game, etc. - The enclosure is hand-built from walnut with a powder coated steel faceplate and solid brass cutter bar. The faceplate is magnetic and pops off for easy paper roll changes.

Source: https://github.com/travmiller/paper-console

Happy to answer questions about the build, the software, or anything else. If there is any interest I may do a limited build of 10 units! Let me know!