So, I have hinted that my anniversary present for Brianne was both incredibly nerdy, but also very sweet. What I created was an internet connected thermal receipt printer. It pings twitter every minute looking for tweets from an account I set up specifically to send love notes. To pull it off, I first bought an Arduino Ethernet and hit the internetz. What I found was a fairly turn-key kit from Adafruit that had the printer, ribbon cable, headers, AC adapter, DC power plug and the printer enclosure. It also had reference documents that stepped me through assembly and helped with the printer drivers and basic sketch. I did a little “hot rodding” to make it work more like I wanted, but it was a pretty safe, well-supported first project.
The rat’s nest inside this thing
After burning myself a few times with the soldering iron, re-doing everything more than a few times and cutting my thumb while attempting to strip cables, I had the board assembled and was ready to paint. Of course, the one day I had to paint, there was a front moving through and I would go out to check on the parts and find half a forest’s leaves and dust over everything. After painting, sanding all the crap off, painting again, cussing and then giving up and I drew the little cupid-robot mascot onto the front door. I smudged it, of course, so I sanded and then re-painted the door and redrew the robot. (Are you seeing a pattern here?)
Finally, after all the parts were ready to assemble I got the box together and very carefully connected the arduino to my computer. Minutes later I had the printer library installed and the sketch uploaded. Now for the moment of truth…
Success! With everything working now, all I had to do was wait. I was a month early with my present so as to have plenty of time for trouble-shooting, cussing, re-building, etc. But all was working. I would test it periodically to make sure all was still good but very little had to be done.
So here it is, a week before our official anniversary and time for the big reveal. Would Brianne hate it? Pity me? Not know what to say? Well, as it turns out, she knew exactly what it meant and was very excited to have it. It took a little router restarting and some tense “will it work?”moments, but now it’s cranking away, printing tweets, and adding a little romance to our ever smarter home appliances.
Here’s to many more years, and techno-romance 140 characters at a time!
Love you boo!
