In the first part of this post, I experimented with laser cutting and started down the path to a goal that I had made public at ReasonsTo. To whit,  “Document and invest in your products, not just your time.” This in turn had been inspired by a Instagram post from Brendan Dawes , “…finish them they become a thing. Otherwise they’re just intent.”

The output of this personal goal was the creation of enclosures, through desktop manufacturing, to create Products were there once were Prototypes.

The first of these was The Google Poetry Printer, a project from 3 years ago that was now just a cardboard box with some wires in it, as the Arduino and Ethernet Shield had been cannibalised for other projects.

“Google writes poetry on subjects that people are truly interested in.”

The ‘Poetry printer utilised the @googlepoetics twitter feed as a data source, itself a secondary product of the Google Poetics tumblr blog. When the button on my ‘Printer is pressed, the Arduino makes a call to a PHP script which uses the  Twitter API to pull 100 tweets from the feed, randomly select 1, format the text & line breaks for the thermal printer and finally, return as JSON.

 

Below you’ll see both 3mm MDF and 2mm clear Perspex versions.

MDF version. Personally, I prefer the clear perspex for display purposes.