very morning starts the same way: you pick up your smartphone to check the weather or your schedule, and half an hour later you find yourself scrolling endlessly through a news feed. A Reddit user going by the handle ImX99 has proposed a radical cure for this digital addiction, turning a miniature computer and an old receipt printer into a physical household bulletin. The project, called Printr, prints everything a family needs on standard receipt paper—from weather forecasts to grocery lists.
The system is assembled from readily available hardware. As the creator noted on Reddit, the device relies on a Raspberry Pi 3B and an Epson TM-T88V printer to handle scheduled or on-demand printing. You do not need to buy expensive gadgets or master complex user interfaces, because the information you actually need materializes on paper right on schedule or whenever you trigger it.
What the Home Printing Press Can Do
For such a simple stack of hardware, the customization options are surprisingly vast. Users get access to 55 different mini-widgets to configure the paper tape for their household routines.
The Printr app includes 55 customizable widgets: weather icons, Lichess chess puzzle, sudoku, crosswords, and notes, to name a few.
That toolkit features weather icons complete with clothing suggestions like coats or umbrellas, alongside a puzzle generator for sudoku, kakuro, takuzu, hashi, crosswords, word searches, and mazes. For puzzle enthusiasts, there is a daily chess challenge with a board rendered straight onto the paper slip. Beyond entertainment, the project tackles perennial domestic arguments: a rotating weekly chore schedule assigns tasks among children, which the developer claims has completely stopped the babbled excuses. The paper strip also prints birthdays, trash collection days, grocery lists, and photo notes for anyone left behind at home.
Who Needs This and What It Costs
Of course, the central question is whether it is actually worth spending an evening putting this contraption together. If you already have the necessary parts gathering dust in a closet or on a shelf, the project costs next to nothing and takes minimal setup time.
Owners of a spare Raspberry Pi 3B and an Epson TM-T88V receipt printer can grab all the required code on GitHub and set it up independently. It makes an ideal choice for anyone exhausted by constant smartphone notifications who wants to bring a simple, tactile routine back into the kitchen without adding another glowing screen to the morning table.
Editorial analysis
How the story developed
In September 2026, maker arnegiacomo built the Fugleramme smart picture frame using a Raspberry Pi 5, an Inky Impression E-Ink screen, and an outdoor microphone to identify birds offline, followed in October by Elecrow's $599 CrowPi 3 learning kit featuring a touchscreen and 41 sensors. Continuing this maker trend, Reddit user ImX99 introduced the Printr project, wiring a compact computer to an old receipt printer to print daily weather and shopping lists directly on paper tape. It looks like DIY makers are increasingly turning Raspberry Pi hardware into specialized household tools designed to deliver essential data without smartphone screens.
Sources: our stories of 06.09.2026, 18.10.2026