A Raspberry Pi Zero W runs a PHP cron job each morning to fetch news, weather, stocks, and Reddit posts and print them on a vintage dot matrix printer.
Key Takeaways
Hardware stack: Star NP-10 dot matrix (mid-80s, ~$40 used), Raspberry Pi Zero W, serial-to-USB adapter; printer exposed at /dev/usb/lp0 after chmod 666.
Character output uses IBM Code Page 437 hex values sent via fwrite() to the device file; box-drawing characters handle section headers and borders at 80-char page width.
Data is entirely free or near-free: Open-Meteo (no key), TwelveData free tier (stocks), NYTimes API free tier, Reddit JSON endpoint with spoofed User-Agent.
A word-wrap function splits headline and Reddit post strings on word boundaries before writing to avoid mid-word line breaks the printer cannot handle.
Cron triggers php print.php at 8am; output is a single rip-off sheet covering weather, stocks, top headlines, and subreddit picks.
Hacker News Comment Review
The sole comment points to a prior HN thread on the same or similar project, suggesting this is a repost or revival with previous discussion worth reading there instead.
