Little Printer hackday shows what the tiny printer can do

While we’re still anxiously awaiting the arrival of Little Printer, creator BERG recently held a hackday for the device, providing a glimpse at what we can expect when the printer is finally available. Over the course of around six hours 18 different hacks were created for the device, which let you print up everything from an ASCII art weather forecast to Google Calendar details to pictures of cute cats. And for at least one of the creators on hand, designing printable information proved somewhat of a challenge.

“Whilst using the developer API was easy, designing for LP was surprisingly hard,” says software developer Dan W. Williams. “What works on a web page or a mobile app doesn’t translate to small pieces of black and white paper.” Williams’ hack Little Emma, which you can see below, prints up the current location of the Emma Mærsk container ship. He says that much of his time working on it was spent finding the best map style for the device’s thermal paper. The Little Printer is still scheduled for a “beta” release sometime in 2012.