About

time could also be

speculating about
the past

puzzling over
the future

estimating
the present.

Project by Sonja Schwarz

Code Stefan Avramescu
Product Design IG:@lenn.gerlach
2nd Brain IG:@janoschkratz.eu

This project was developed in context of the exhibition "Punkt Punkt Komma Strich” about code and computer languages at the Museum of Literature in Marbach. An algorythm generates a poem describing the current time in poetry instead of numbers. The poem is then printed by a thermal printer as soon as the visitor pushes the button.

Quick start

• Setup a Raspberry Pi install. If you need to connect a headless setup to wifi you can use wpa_supplicant.conf but by now there should be an official, more convenient way for headless setup.
• Clone repo to /home/pi
• Create a venv called venv and activate it
• Install requirements
• Connect a button to GPIO 26
• Setup your thermal printer. The script will assume /dev/usb/lp0 is your printer, change that if necessary.
• Use start.sh in a cron job to start on boot.

273084619_315282183861774_1923607753398185020_n.mp4

FAQ

Q: Why is this not an installable package?

A: Had to hack this too quick to actually structure it properly. Not really a problem since this was never supposed to be released. Feel free to improve and contribute.

Q: What printer should I use?

A: We used an old Epson TM-T88 IV via USB.

Q: What is OCRB Regular.ttf?

A: The font we used. It's not included because of licensing.

Q: Has anyone actually asked one of these questions?

A: No but I realised I never wrote a readme so I thought maybe someone will see this and be happy to have like a bit of guidance.