I bought my first Raspberry Pi a little while ago. I grew up with my Grandpa building cool projects on the Pi. I was always interested in building my own, but never got the chance to.

Around a week ago, I saw two projects on Twitter. Once was a receipt printer that could print out daily tasks, and the other was a light display that people could send their own designs to.

Inspired by these, I decided to build my first Raspberry Pi project: Message Maddie. It’s a Raspberry Pi 4B connected to a generic thermal receipt printer. Built with Cursor, a Convex database, and frontend hosted on Netlify.

Basically, you go to the website: https://message-maddie.netlify.app, enter whatever message you’d like to send, and it’ll print out instantly on my printer.

I posted it on Reddit and have received over 1300 messages so far, from what seems like every corner of the world. It’s absolutely incredible to me what people have chosen to share: everything from a “Hello!” to their deepest hopes and dreams. I started this as a fun little project, but it’s become so much bigger than that. I’ve never felt so connected to the world.

I also decided to open source the project if anyone would like to build their own! I’ve had people tell me they’re going to build one to communicate with their small kids while they’re going through a divorce, or to send messages to their partners while they’re doing long-distance. This is my first open source project, so please reach out with any issues! https://github.com/maddiedreese/ticket-printer-os

Hope to see a message from you come through on my printer soon!