Thu 15 Jan 2009
I have hopped onto the Twitter bandwagon and created an account for my FreeBSD media server. My goal was to have the machine check Twitter periodically and send any tweets designated for it to a small thermal printer. This way, if I wanted to remind myself to pick up some milk and bread, I could send a tweet @routed and it would be documented. I bought a Verifone PrintPak 300 credit card receipt printer off eBay for a very reasonable $20 shipped. This printer was small and had an RS-232 interface (see cable pinout below). Although the printer would like hardware handshaking, I just tied the RTS and CTS pins together on the printer and was sure to wait one second between printing lines in my script. The cable has mini-din on one end and DB9 on the other end, however, it is straight forward to make a DB25 cable as well. The software control is done by a small Perl script (also below) designed to run on a UNIX/Linux system that checks friends timeline every few minutes and prints any new posts to the serial port. It is not very intelligent and does not convert dates/times to the local time zone (unless you live in GMT). My future plans are to make this printer wireless using one of the TI RF/USB development boards so that the printer can go on top of the kitchen refrigerator and the media server can stay in the office.
Feel free to post your twitter account in the comments and I will have the server follow you so that you too can add grocery suggestions.
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Great idea, I ordered a similar one and plan on putting a piezo/blinking light on it like an answering machine.
Concerning wireless, there are now zigbee usb adapters for pretty cheap. Check out the new Mouser, first few pages have quite a bit of RF solutions.
Thanks for the compliment, I have a couple of TI’s eZ430-RF2500 boards so I am planning to just use one of those. It might take me a few weeks but I hope to do it sometime in February.