about a month ago i attended tinker it's beginner arduino workshop. the arduino is an open source hardware platform aimed at hackers and makers who want a low cost physical computing development environment. i guess i'm one of those people.

my imagination has been captured by the renaissance of paper among techies and when i saw tom taylor's microprinter i knew wanted one. very fortunately, the only way to get one is to build it yourself. so i did.

i managed to get it up and running without much trouble (step by step details are on my project page) but i wanted to build something a bit more. tom designed a morning report so that seemed as good a place as any to start. i pull in my diary for the day from google calendar, the top 10 current trends on twitter, the london weather from yahoo (which i love because it includes sunrise and sunset), a few news headlines from rss feeds and a couple of currency conversion rates from yahoo finance. the original plan was to have it print every morning at 0730 as a kind of alarm but i soon went off that idea... click on the image below to see the large version with readable text.

for christmas i asked for a mir:ror, a product by violet (makers of the nabaztag) who dream of making every object in the world a cobject (connected object). i thought of using the action of placing a nanoztag micro-rabbit on the mir:ror to trigger the printer into action - using one rabbit would print the report and using the other rabbit would print recent twitters. here's a video of that in action...

i created my own lightweight markup to specify different text styles, for instance __this bit__ would make 'this bit' underlined and there's something similar for red text, text width and height and highlight mode. that's all handled by the arduino which then sends the relevant command to turn on and off the particular styles.

so that's where i've got to so far. for anyone interested there's some sample arduino code available on github (of course, the commands are specific to the printer model i have which is the citizen idp-3420), photos on flickr and the video embedded above on vimeo. for anyone thinking of taking on a microprinter project, this wiki is worth checking out to see what other people have done and as mentioned earlier i've put up a project page detailing the initial steps i went through to get it working.

i'd really appreciate your thoughts or suggestions so please tweet me a comment using the link below. my own ideas around it are to continue developing it by making it more permanent; running the arduino standalone from a battery (currently it's powered by usb), wiring it up to a real serial cable (instead of just poking the wires into the printer port) and soldering the circuit onto a smaller board so i can package it all up nicely.

but one thing at a time.