I thought about doing something like this so I could turn the tickets I work on into paper tickets but never quite got around to it.
(I did buy a cheap receipt printer on eBay though and managed to burn it out in the first 10 minutes of printing. ProTip: a receipt printer with the width specified in inches is likely to be a quality printer by a reputable manufacturer, one specified in mm is likely to be a piece of junk from China.)
Adding a QR code would help a lot in terms of making a cyber-physical object where you could close the ticket by pointing at it...
I've had a few crap Chinese receipt printers. I do appreciate that they print Chinese characters because I print a lot of anime fan art and art reproductions of 19th century Japanese prints and like to put as much kanji as I can on the back sides. On the other hand other than some official Pokemon art that renders beautifully on thermal printers because it was thought through like the Ansel Adams Zone System
I do almost all this work with inkjet printers and rasterize it all myself.
(I wrote my own text rendering engine for vertical CJK text, not because I was unhappy with the results I got printing characters with uniformly square metrics but because I wanted western characters and dingbats I introduced to look good. Sooner or later I'll probably write my own text rendering engine for horizontal roman text because I haven't met a kerning engine I really like and because there are many typographical details like ordinals (e.g. 5ᵗʰ) that I'd like to have better control of.)
I am buying these off eBay in the United States. English units might mean "culturally sensitive" which is a tracer for quality.
A Zebra or NCR sold in the US will be marketed with English units, the same printer is probably marketed in the E.U. with metric units.
The people selling the off brand printer might not know or could care less what units are used in the area it is being marketed in, which is a tracer for them not caring about any other quality attributes of the product.
I had one of these as well that you could print just by writing to a device file. I'm sure it had fancier formats for graphics and stuff but it was fun to just use some ascii art to get something printed.
Literally why I built this in the first place. Work is one thing, but my side project issue notifications kind of just got lost in the mix of noise coming through my email, and I'd forget to check them out.
Those things always drive me crazy. Something about having a metal spike sticking up from a counter.
Although I’ve always had problems with sharp corners. For instance, if I’m reading in a chair and there’s a small table next to me and the corner is sharp, I can’t handle it and have to cover it (like set a book so it’s hanging over the edge). It bugs my eyes for some reason. Same if I’m watching TV and there’s furniture with sharp corners near the TV.
I really hate that this affects me so much, so mostly sharing in case someone else deals with this or knows what’s going on.
I had a friend in elementary school who suffered from the same thing. He never mentioned table corners, but he definitely requested that you don't hold pencils with the pointy bit up if you sit next to him.
These printers are fun. I got one from a hardware swap meet a few years back and used the same software to work it into a public art project I did a bit later. You could listen to or record your own “dream” story to a kiosk, and upon leaving one, you’d get a paper receipt. It was a fun, tangible interaction that gave a bit of permanence to something purely audio.
"instant photo" printers are another fun tangible thing like that! Polaroid nailed it way back when, everyone loves something instant and tangible like that.
You can get Fuji printers which use Instax film, or Canon makes a similar one they call the Selphy, or there's the Zink printer line as well.
There's something about a physical reference to information that you can't quite capture digitally. You can hand it to someone. You can use it as a prop to express your happiness or frustration. You can destroy.
I know this was a fun project but I hope we can capture more physical interactions in the future, and not just in VR.
Having done "post-it notes on a board" at an earlier job, I could not feel more different about it. Post-it notes sucked - they're not big enough to capture any history or context, and the types of tasks I was handed would be about 10-20 extra subtasks on their own.
I ended up trolling the system by simply adding post-it notes to post-it notes for subtasks as a protest against the fact that I could never keep any useful detail against them and the tasks themselves ranged between gigantic and functionally unsolvable (it was infrastructure work, so "done" didn't really exist).
I have a receipt printer I was using for grocery lists. I still haven't found a good use for it yet. I love how extremely fast it is though and it has auto cut. Maybe I can use it for a ticket system at work.
Fun fact: code page 437 didn't die with DOS. It's still what receipt printers default to, judging by all the mojibake variations on ”Tack för besöket, välkommen åter!” I've seen in daily life in Sweden.
This is a fun idea, but I've read thermal paper is surprisingly nasty stuff. [Edit: unless it's advertised as "phenol-free".] It's not just paper. It contains plastics (BPA or BPS) that you absorb through your skin when handling it. I'd avoid working with receipts at my desk all day. (I'd also avoid being a grocery store cashier...)
I think "BPA free" means "BPS". I think that's less-studied but not necessarily better. [Edit: but "phenol-free" is likely actually safe, thanks for pointing that out. I should read my own link fully!]
"If you must give paper receipts, look for “phenol-free” paper, which is safer for human health and has fewer environmental effects. Three types that do not contain BPA or BPS and are competitively priced contain either ascorbic acid (vitamin C), urea-based Pergafast 201, or a technology without developers, Blue4est. The latter uses a coating that reveals an underlying dark layer when heat is applied."
Yeah, the machine came with a few spools of BPA-free paper, but that just means there's a less-tested alternative like some of the responses are saying. I was a cashier for 4 years though, so this is probably a drop in the bucket for what's already in my system.
If you spend more than two minutes looking into it you might find a link to cancer. I don't know. That is just the most concerning research I found in the short time I allotted to the task.
As someone who once worked a job in retail where we printed receipts on dot matrix printers on triplicate paper, we longed for thermal printing at the time. Noise, speed, and jams were a common occurrence.
No trying to get cashiers to refill ink properly is, I assume, the main business benefit. The only thing they refill is paper, which should be dead simple on a decent thermal printer.
Pros: faster, quieter, better quality, don't need to know how to load ribbon when it runs out.
Cons: fancy paper, fades over time, destroyed by even minor heat.
We switched from dot matrix receipts to thermal a few years ago and there were several very vocal complaints about the relative impermanence of a thermal receipt.
There was essentially no reasonable distance at which we could store the to-go pizzas from their accompanying thermal receipts where information the receipts contained would be recoverable.
Good point, I forgot about food. We don't sell anything hot, but a lot of our customers work out of trucks or vans and some complained that the receipts were unreadable after leaving them in their vehicles in the summer.
No ink cartridge/ribbon/toner, the head is "solid state", and they can be very, very fast as the head is a linear array the width of the printable area.
Also, the cynic in me says that thermal paper is exceptionally fragile and this benefits return policies. Thermal receipt paper falls apart readily when wet, bleaches quickly, and of course turns black if exposed to too much heat.
If you're never seen a thermal printer hooked up properly with proper software... those things are insanely fast. It can spit out a meter/yard long receipt in two seconds. Nothing else comes close.
It also uses paper in rolls, without requiring spools, and no ink/toner/ribbons to replace which would be both more complicated and take longer.
This is awesome. I'm a solo dev and I created an electron app named Label LIVE. I recently added an HTTP API so you can fire off label jobs using a POST request (or retrieve label PNGs via GET). What Label LIVE affords is a WYSIWYG imaging pipeline that can target many different thermal printers at the correct DPI, or generate/submit PDFs to a printer (system or network). If you mention this note and your project, I'll send you a free license for "testing." :D (and no, no direct Linux-Desktop support yet, sorry!) Read more at https://label.live/guides/automated-label-printing-integrati...
With a camera in the roof pointed at it that OCRs the most recently stabbed ticket and automatically marks it as 'done' with any comments you hand-wrote onto the slip of paper.
Quick question though. Why go through all the hassle with the custom udev rule and dialout group if you are just using sudo to run the script after all?
Heh, that's in the article under _Wrapping up and next steps_
> For the tickets themselves, a QR code could be added to link directly to the issue on GitHub. You could also add in more details from the issue itself like tags and severity.
If it could be closed right away, wouldn't you do that before you print it out? Perhaps I'm a luddite, but wouldn't typing the ticket number into a box almost certainly be faster than getting your phone out, turning it on and scanning the code?
The printers unusually can create barcodes and some of them also QR codes.
But it is also possible to print images. You can also configure them as standard printers and print via any common printing system (cups, windows spooler, …)
177 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] thread(I did buy a cheap receipt printer on eBay though and managed to burn it out in the first 10 minutes of printing. ProTip: a receipt printer with the width specified in inches is likely to be a quality printer by a reputable manufacturer, one specified in mm is likely to be a piece of junk from China.)
Adding a QR code would help a lot in terms of making a cyber-physical object where you could close the ticket by pointing at it...
is the intention I think. Not a fair distinction imho, but to each their own.
https://safebooru.donmai.us/posts/2477177
I do almost all this work with inkjet printers and rasterize it all myself.
(I wrote my own text rendering engine for vertical CJK text, not because I was unhappy with the results I got printing characters with uniformly square metrics but because I wanted western characters and dingbats I introduced to look good. Sooner or later I'll probably write my own text rendering engine for horizontal roman text because I haven't met a kerning engine I really like and because there are many typographical details like ordinals (e.g. 5ᵗʰ) that I'd like to have better control of.)
A Zebra or NCR sold in the US will be marketed with English units, the same printer is probably marketed in the E.U. with metric units.
The people selling the off brand printer might not know or could care less what units are used in the area it is being marketed in, which is a tracer for them not caring about any other quality attributes of the product.
It should play an MP3 of a line cook in a busy diner shouting, "Order up!", and then he can stick it on a rotating order wheel hanging above his desk.
EDIT: One of these things: https://www.webstaurantstore.com/choice-stainless-steel-orde...
Although I’ve always had problems with sharp corners. For instance, if I’m reading in a chair and there’s a small table next to me and the corner is sharp, I can’t handle it and have to cover it (like set a book so it’s hanging over the edge). It bugs my eyes for some reason. Same if I’m watching TV and there’s furniture with sharp corners near the TV.
I really hate that this affects me so much, so mostly sharing in case someone else deals with this or knows what’s going on.
Sounds like it sucks. Take care of yourself!
https://www.amazon.com/Winco-Order-Rack-Aluminium-24/dp/B01E...
For those who haven't been around kitchen culture, it's common to joke about having nightmares about the sound of the ticket printer.
https://justinmiller.io/services/dreamdial1.jpg
You can get Fuji printers which use Instax film, or Canon makes a similar one they call the Selphy, or there's the Zink printer line as well.
"Just `chmod 777` it" as the universal solution to permission issues is usually solving the wrong problem.
I know this was a fun project but I hope we can capture more physical interactions in the future, and not just in VR.
If someone starts minting NFTs for issues I’m in your corner tho
I ended up trolling the system by simply adding post-it notes to post-it notes for subtasks as a protest against the fact that I could never keep any useful detail against them and the tasks themselves ranged between gigantic and functionally unsolvable (it was infrastructure work, so "done" didn't really exist).
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/green-chemistry/bpa-thermal-pape...
Those blue receipt papers seem okay though: https://www.koehlerpaper.com/en/products/Thermal-paper/Blue4...
"If you must give paper receipts, look for “phenol-free” paper, which is safer for human health and has fewer environmental effects. Three types that do not contain BPA or BPS and are competitively priced contain either ascorbic acid (vitamin C), urea-based Pergafast 201, or a technology without developers, Blue4est. The latter uses a coating that reveals an underlying dark layer when heat is applied."
Or so they said on AliExpress.
> The chemicals have been shown to be hazardous to reproductive systems in humans and animals and are linked with obesity and attention disorders.
Cons: fancy paper, fades over time, destroyed by even minor heat.
We switched from dot matrix receipts to thermal a few years ago and there were several very vocal complaints about the relative impermanence of a thermal receipt.
There was essentially no reasonable distance at which we could store the to-go pizzas from their accompanying thermal receipts where information the receipts contained would be recoverable.
Also, the cynic in me says that thermal paper is exceptionally fragile and this benefits return policies. Thermal receipt paper falls apart readily when wet, bleaches quickly, and of course turns black if exposed to too much heat.
It also uses paper in rolls, without requiring spools, and no ink/toner/ribbons to replace which would be both more complicated and take longer.
There is an embedded twitter video, but it seems more aligned with the spirit of the project to use the traditional visual aids :)
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/green-chemistry/bpa-thermal-pape...
The only logical next step here is to get that metal spike thing, so you can stab closed issues on completion.
/s
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0f3i7xv2QbOeofiM4atMtSCzA
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/dozens-of-food-and-drink-r...
Quick question though. Why go through all the hassle with the custom udev rule and dialout group if you are just using sudo to run the script after all?
Then could scan with your phone to bring the issue up for immediate triage. I imagine lots of issues can be closed right away (or very quickly).
> For the tickets themselves, a QR code could be added to link directly to the issue on GitHub. You could also add in more details from the issue itself like tags and severity.
But it is also possible to print images. You can also configure them as standard printers and print via any common printing system (cups, windows spooler, …)