Ben Holloway

Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper.

Little printer is a new concept bringing paper back into our digital lives. What it essentially does is grabs all of your feeds that you’ve chosen via a handy iOS/Android app and prints them out on thermal paper. You just rip it off and you can read it any time anywhere. Personally I think it’s quite handy. For those days when you can’t be bothered to get your computer started up, open your browser, login to your subscription, find your favourties. Little printer does all that with a touch of a button and within 5 seconds. 

The printer uses thermal paper which means you don’t have to keep buying ink cartridges and just the paper. The whole thing is based on the same technology used in supermarket recipts but it has a higher resolution. 

BergCloud, the company who makes the thing reckons that if you’re a heavy user a roll of the special paper will last you about 2 weeks and if you’re a light user (2 blasts a day) then it’ll last you around 6 months.

Pre-orders for Little Printer will open in 2012, when it launches as a ‘beta’ product. Join the mailing list to be the first to get the news.

The internet of all things has been talked about for years. But even though technology grows ever bigger only a handfull of devices are connected to the internet. Electric Imp is meant to change that.

The electric imp is basically an SD card-sized WiFi chip and processing unit. It can be manipulated to do pretty much anything and at $25 per unit (plus $7 for the basic breakout board) it’s a steal. The official PR is:

The Imp uses WiFi and a cloud service to make it easier than ever before for vendors to internet-enable their products, bringing the power of the internet to places and devices it could never reach before.

Been having a look around the internet and it’s proving to be verstaile. So far i’ve seen: Seven-segment counters, Water level sensors, RGB lights, Christmas lights, Power monitor, Pet feeders, 16x16 LED display, Receipt printers. The startup’s servers provide simple access to web services like Twitter via the cloud letting developers focus on the core appliance functionality rather than having to hack away at APIs and requests.

The electric imp will start shipping in late June in the U.S. along with three developer boards:

• April ($7): A basic prototyping board
• Hannah ($25): A hobbyist board, including an RGB light sensor, RGB light, accelerometer, temperature sensor, hall effect detector, potentiometer, two buttons, two servo connectors and a battery holder
• Duino ($20): An Arduino board, replacing the USB port with an Electric Imp SD slot for wireless control.

N.B. the picture at the top is all of the breakout boards in ascending order.

(Source: electricimp.com)