Let people send me printed messages via the cat printer

Scope

1. integrate with the site
2. no scale, just a one-off project for me
3. later, maybe, put it in a nice wooden box and give to someone

My setup:

Intel Mac running GitHub - rbaron/catprinter: 🐱🖨
(It's my local server and I'm connecting to it via ssh from an M1 Machine, because of a driver issue)

graph TD

printer["Cat Printer"]
bt["Bluetooth LE"]
repo["rbaron/catprinter"]
python["Watcher Script"]

python --> repo --> bt --> printer

• Watcher Script: A script watching a dir and calling rbaron/catprinter

Next

• watcher can poll Vercel KV with a queue of print jobs
• build a simple webhook/UI for adding items to the queue

What's hard

• matching the right cat printer version with the right client lib
  • could be solved by buying the white-labelled version on the cheap

TIL

• more python than node libs available
• needed to decompile java code to see the printer ids, mangled command ids etc...

References:

Cat Printer – tools and resources

#article-idea