This is hot. Printing has most definitively fallen out of favour among the geek crowd. Paper, ink, bulky machines, screw that noise. If it’s not convenient, cute of ultra-hipster, it ain’t going to fly in this modern world of ours. Enter mPrinter, the palm-sized thermal printer that prints “dynamic snippets of information” or outside of PR-speak, it’s a re-purposed receipt printer with the power to print whatever the hell we want.
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Fully financed
This man, Andy Muldowney offered his idea and soul up to Kickstarter and happily for Muldowney, mPrinter’s been fully financed well past his humble goal of US$10 000. With 27 days to go until funding wraps up, the mPrinter sits on US$18 980. Cue the “not bad” Obama face.
Tiny, inky magic
mPrinter is a very small, very portable thermal imaging device which prints HTML, text, images and dynamic data created from a custom hosted Javascript environment on mPrinter’s website (which is “largely complete”). Printed resolution not’s so bad, with a 200 dpi printhead delivering sharp text and the “possibility” of half-tone black and white images. All in space no larger than half a sandwich.
Behind the scenes, Javascript powers mPrinter. And Muldowney says that anything we can view in a web browser, mPrinter can churn out. So that’s Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, grabbing info from a database, printing recipes and hell, whatever the hell us this tiny bastard can offer.
We hate Javascript though and thankfully, there’s other printing options. mPrinter’s website lets users quick print care of a full-fledged WYSIWYG editor. And then there’s the iOS and Android mPrinter app which for now, is mainly used for quick printing simple doodles. Muldowney’s got us fully covered. The schematics, board layouts and firmware are going to remain open source, this is a printer that wants to be fiddled with.
Portable printing power
This is how it works: mPrinter comes in two flavours, a USB model for PC or Mac or the slightly more expensive wireless model. Printer heads are two inches, and once funding tops US$20 000, all mPrinters will upgrade to three-inch heads. With funding literally days away from this, it’s more than a sure thing. Also, mPrinter is said to work with anything
The little buggers self-charging as well, care of charging circuitry and a battery compartment for an optional LiPo battery.
It doesn’t exist, yet
As far as the consumer model goes, there’s nothing to speak of. We’ve got pretty pictures to show you and a tale to spin, but ultimately we’re gonna have to wait another month for this puppy to jump out of Kickstarter-ville and into reality land. People, there’s a scant 27 days until heavily-funded mPrinter makes the jump from concept art to reality.
Our take? This things a winner and the ability to quick print with notoriously cheap and power-friendly thermal heads is a boon of note. Back this bitch for as little as US$1, or US$2500 for the high-end sheeeeyaat and join us on the other side, We’ll have tiny printers.
