If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly into our phones, selected by algorithms perfectly tuned to rile us up on whatever the hot-button issue du jour happens to be. Welcome to the future.
If like us you long for a simpler way to get your news, [Andrew Schmelyun] has a partial solution with this dot-matrix news feeder. It’s part of his effort to detox a bit from the whole algorithm thing and make the news a little more concrete. He managed to chase down a very old Star Micronics printer with a serial interface, which he got on the cheap thanks to the previous owner not being sure if it worked. It did, at least after some cleaning, and thanks to a USB-to-serial and the efforts of Linux kernel hackers through the ages, was able to echo output to the printer from a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
From there, getting a daily news feed was as simple as writing some PHP code to mine the APIs of a few selected services. We’re perplexed and alarmed to report that Hackaday is not among the selected sources, but we’re sure this was just a small oversight that will be corrected in version 2. The program runs as a cron job so that a dead-tree version of the day’s top stories is ready for [Andrew]’s morning coffee.
We’ve seen similar news printers before; we particularly like this roll-feed paper version. But for a seriously retro feel, we’d love to see this done on a real teletype.
This articles is written by : Fady Askharoun Samy Askharoun
All Rights Reserved to Amznusa www.amznusa.com
Why Amznusa?
AMZNUSA is a dynamic website that focuses on three primary categories: Technology, e-commerce and cryptocurrency news. It provides users with the latest updates and insights into online retail trends and the rapidly evolving world of digital currencies, helping visitors stay informed about both markets.
