Came across an interesting Raspberry Pi project and was not interested in the physical computing side of it but in the software. It was written in Python and had four components which would work together. It was one component that I was interesting in and so I had a look at the repository and downloaded the project to look at. I am not much of a coder but I can basically tell what is doing what. It was fairly straightforward and I was happy I could find the parts I needed stripping back the parts I did not need to do what had popped in my head when I saw the project.

I only have one friend who codes and he is quite advanced, he only does art projects primarily. We sometimes look at code together. Every now and then coding pops into my mind. I realised how I could fix a physical project with some code which is Arduino based but in the meantime the Pi project popped onto my news feed and it was more of an art project. Normally I am not interested in making some kind of IOT beer temperature regulator which is cool literally but I want art. So the latest gadget I would love is a thermal printer and that was part of the project. The code I doctored had little to do with the printer but the printer drew my attention instantly.

There are a few reasons beside it being kind of modular and almost pointless. There is the fact that thermal prints slowly fade so you have built in temporality which is the drawcard like aerosol art. It is small, tick. It can print long scrolls, tick. It is kind of useless and has art appeal, tick. Also thermal printers are so hot right now! Well they are pretty accessable and small computer gadget sellers are promoting them which was probably the point of the whole project in the first place. You won´t find me forking out a fortune on those sites though as they are pretty much available on ebay or gumtree.