What’s happening here:
1. I bought a thermal printer;
2. hooked it up to a raspberry pi;
3. same pi is also hosting MQTT;
4. configured my hildebrand/glow IHD to send messages to said MQTT
The last bit of the puzzle is a little script to run on a cron schedule to wait a few seconds for the next elec message, and then parse and print it. There’s a little “if” conditional for flagging when the power is 0 but it’s not active now because it’s 10.30pm and dark. Fuck yeah I’m so chuffed.
Yaaaaaaas it works! Thanks to this I have managed to time both washing machine AND dishwasher today to take full advantage of the sun shining ☀️. Piping text to the linux command `lp -s` is definitely the easiest way of printing I’ve ever come across.
Next: I’m gonna find an API to tell me how “dirty” the grid in my area is right now & check if I’m using lots to prompt me to turn things off if I can.
@herdingdata Neat! I remember using ‘lp’, like, 20 odd years ago. Sometimes the simpler things are the best!
@semanticist this thermal printer is delightfully simple. (Rhetorical:) why aren’t more consumer products simple? 😭😭😭
