Printer Paint

(A demo Printer application)

This application can send drawings to printers, where they will be printed out. Find out more about printers. It's really just an example of how you can build a simple content provider for diminutive internet printers.

If you just want to poke around you can send Exciting a sketch, or take a look at the source.

If you have a printer, and want to use this instance of Printer Paint to receive pictures you can register here.

If you don't have a printer, why not find out how to get or make a printer for yourself?

How it works

The paint app is very similar to the mail app. Printers are registered by storing their print URL along side a nickname, which forms the URL in this app (e.g. /send/exciting).

When a drawing is "sent", the contents of the HTML5 canvas are serialised into a form field and stored in the database, associated with the printer record.

The application then sends a request to the given print URL with the URL for that drawing (e.g. /pictures/6). The printer backend server then takes care of rasterising the image, and making it available to the right printer.

More information

To find out more, you can take a look at any (or all) of the following:

• The introductory blog post;
• The project page;
• The backend server we are running;
• The source for this app, the mail app, the weather scheduled content app or the backend server itself.