Little Printer was a little internet-connected thermal printer and creative content platform - the brainchild of interaction design studio Berg back in 2012.
This cute little device printed your favourite articles, puzzles and social content on thermal paper, like a miniature newspaper or personal fax machine!
Why? It’s surprisingly fun and delightful. It also serves as an experimental provocation for how the physical and digital converge, and the new social experiences and relationships this might enable.
Little Printers is a new iOS and IoT cloud platform designed to bring your Little Printer back to life.
We’ve built on the open source ”Sirius” server, adding a new sharing model, creating a fun new app and some cool new features.
Why? We were sad when our Little Printers stopped working so took it upon ourselves to resurrect them. This also served as a research project to experiment with new approaches, permissions models, applications for how we might develop IoT / connected products in future.
We created a new app, for the Little Printer experience we always wanted.
Now you can print from a handy little app in your pocket, 1 tap away.
From the original Little Printer: a classic. We loved the way the graphic lettering scales edge-to-edge to fill the width. It was painstaking work to replicate the original, but a lot of fun. Now with the added benefit of emoji 😄👍
Print out your photos in delicious 1-bit! Because the Little Printer can only print two colors - black and white, we implemented our favourite dither - 'Atkinson Dither' - from the original Macintosh.
Doodle freehand to send your silliest scribbles in seconds!
Print from any app across iOS via the share sheet. Print photos, notes, screengrabs…
Hook up services like IFTTT to link up anything with RSS - comics, a reddit feed, puzzles, whatever you like!
The team at Berg invested a lot of time developing the visual language and aesthetics of Little Printer, across the physical device and their web service.
It’s a style we love and we’ve done our best to reflect and refresh this in the UI of the app - to be an honest evolution of the original web service.
We think anyone should be able to easily message a Little Printer, without needing to set up an account or sign-in. Just download the Little Printers app and choose a username so your friends know who it is.
When you set up your Little Printer, you can make a ‘device key’ - a unique URL that grants access to message a specific printer. They're sharable, decentralised, and easy to use. Paste the device key into our app to add a printer.
When you share a device key, you're giving permission to print, but also to share that key with other people – just like a phone number.
But unlike a phone number, you can make as many as you like. And if a key gets shared too widely, they can be revoked at any time.
We like the idea of using existing social contracts as permission models for using connected devices. Print out a device key and stick it to your printer so friends, family and visitors to your home can join in the fun.
At the core of the system is Sirius, the open source backend for Little Printer, started by Matt Webb and developed by the open source community.
To support the app, we added device keys and their API.
Device keys are how the app talks to the printer, and are the underlying tech behind our sharing model. Because they're just URLs they're decentralised, like an email address. But unlike an email address they can be revoked at any time if they get into the wrong hands. New keys can be minted and revoked from Sirius.
These device keys also work as an API, so they can be easily hooked up to services like IFTTT or Zapier, or even used in your own scripts.
Printing is as easy as:
curl https://device.li/1234secretkey \
-H 'Content-type: text/plain' \
-d 'hello'
You can also send messages in HTML, image, and JSON formats. This makes it really simple to plug them into IFTTT, using the Maker action!
Our changes to the Sirius backend (like device keys) are open source on Github. We're also open-sourcing the app. After all, we'd like the work we've done to revive Little Printer to live on, even if we stop working on it. Open source is the best way to do that.
Little Printer is not the only connected product to have the servers go out. With more connected products out there than ever, how can we design them to be more resilient? Do we need legislation to protect consumers? Check out the blog post →
You need to point your Berg Cloud ‘Bridge’ to the new server. There’s a rough guide here, or some people on GitHub are offering this as a service.
Go to littleprinter
Download the iOS app. Add your printer using the device key you made on the management server - send this to friends so they can message your printer.
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