I Built a Thing. The Internet Sent Me a Receipt.

What They Built (and Why It’s Genius)

Maddie essentially built a fax machine using Cursor, a Raspberry Pi 4B, a generic thermal receipt printer, Convex database, and frontend deployed via Netlify. Quite a mouthful of tools and hardware. What a fantastic way to modernize and upcycle some old hardware. It adds a bit of flare to just sending an email and could be a spectacularly retro solution to having to check your emails. I’m sure it comes with a small dopamine rush as soon as you hear the receipt machine starting a print!

What’s Next?

While 1300 messages truly is an astounding number of messages to receive. The next step in the project might be to instead of printing every message, use a Natural Language Processing (NLP) Library like TextBlob to review the message sentiment and only print message above a specific threshold or to flag urgent-sounding messages. This’ll keep the printouts high-quality and manageable.

OR

Another way to look at the project could be adapting it to work as a personal physical log. It could print a daily “ticket” of activity: top three emails received, today’s weather forecast, a quote, and the day’s GitHub contribution count. This’ll make it a bit more of a  privacy and productivity focused aid.