About:

This application monitors your Twitter home timeline or any number (within the Twitter API limits) of hashtags of your choice and prints all incoming Tweets via an ESC/POS compatible thermal printer.

Installation:

System requirements

This application has been developed and tested on Linux, targeting python3.6 or newer. It might work on macOS (likely) and Windows (very unlikely).

Create a virtualenv with the required dependencies

python3 -m venv venv
venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

Getting Twitter API access

• If you already have access enter your consumer key/secret and access token/secret in the next step.
• If you don't have such credentials you must create a Twitter App and get the required information after you've created it.

Create and fill in config.toml

cp config.toml.example config.toml
$EDITOR config.toml
# Put the required information into config.toml

Besides the already mentioned API credentials the config.toml contains other (interesting) settings. For each setting there is a short explanation on what the setting does and what the default value is if the setting is not defined.

Printing Tweets

Check your thermal printer

• Ensure it supports ESC/POS.
• See if your operating system detects your printer (look at the output of dmesg).
• Check if the user that will be running this application can access the printer (check ls -l /dev/usb/lp*, id $USER).
• A line width of 48 characters and Latin-1 as printer codepage 6 are assumed.
• This application was tested with a Excelvan/Hoin HOP-E801 printer. No other models/printers have been tested yet.

Printing your home timeline

venv/bin/python3 printer.py --printer /path/to/printer

If you don't want to see retweets make sure to include the -n or--no-retweets option in the command line above

Printing a specific (or multiple) hashtags

venv/bin/python3 printer.py --printer /path/to/print "#hashtag1" "#hashtag2"

If you want to see retweets in this mode make sure to include the -r or --retweets option in the command line above

Developing/Testing

You can test this application without a thermal printer connected by simply omitting the -p/--printer argument when starting it. In that case you'll just get the output in your terminal.