Software developer and maker John Riney hacked a thermal label printer into accepting standard receipt paper rolls and then wrote code to create an app that checks Twitter every 30 seconds and will print out any tweets that have a particular hashtag. This modern interpretation of a ticker tape was inspired by how the author was alerted to the recent US east coast earthquake by tweets before it appeared on any other online or broadcast news source.
The video above details how the label printer was modified to accept receipt rolls. The author plans on sharing the source code at the link below very soon. He also plans to modify the software to run on a NSLU2 Network-Attached Storage drive (NAS) to have a dedicated solution instead of keeping the thermal label printer constantly tethered to your main computer.
Tickertweet [Rineysoft via Hack a Day]
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