Smart Thermal
A receipt printer that turns phones into a list maker. Type, paste or photograph something, and a clean paper list comes out.
- Type
- Hardware + software
- Client
- In-house
- Year
- 2026
- Outcome
- In daily use at home
The problem
Shopping lists, reminders and notes live in phones, where they are easy to lose and hard to share at the moment you need them. Paper is quicker to grab, tick off and stick on the fridge, but nobody wants to write the same list twice.
The solution
A small controller (ESP32, cabled to an 80 mm thermal receipt printer) with its own web page. Any phone on the network can type or paste a list, print a photo, pull the text out of a screenshot, use ready-made styles (list, note, love note, a joke parking fine), keep shared lists that several people edit, and schedule prints for later, such as a weekday morning list.
Setup is a QR code on a printed slip: no app, no account. Away from home, a printer can be reached through a private link that its owner hands out. There is no public address.
The result
Prints in seconds from any phone in the house. Long jobs are paced so the printer never overheats, and it recovers by itself from paper-outs and power cuts.
Try it
The demo is the printer's real page with a pretend printer built in. Nothing is sent anywhere; your printouts appear on a strip of virtual paper on screen.