In the old bicycle factory Rog in Ljubljana there is a young FabLab I like to go. This was especially useful before I had my own 3D printer (again) since they have a whole wall of them. To facilitate people they allow you to use the communal plastic filament, which you pay for by the used gram.
Somehow I was the first person to actually have to pay for this material and what I expected to take 5 seconds turned into figuring out together how to use the little carbonless paper stack to write a ticket for the Rog store, having to search which exact archaic code specifies the filament.
My mind was slightly blown that in 2025, in a brand new state-of-the-art FabLab, this was the way to deal with this. And since I liked experimenting with webapps and wanted to work with a thermal printer, I got to work.
Building a little FastHTML app with a tiny database of materials, that presents a simple selection of common items, and prints a ticket via some console commands. For more details see the repo
After some very frustrating experience trying to figure out how to make a not-so-powerful SBC work with a STAR TSP100 printer I added an old phone (of which the sound had died) as the interface. The real challenge though layed before me.
You see, all over the lab are ethernet jacks. But you would be mistaken if you think those are available. NO. Nothing is plugged into any of them. The PC’s in the Lab? Wifi. Turns out bureaucracy means that my little project would never get access to any kind of LAN network. Forget about it.
I tried using a hotspot from the SBC to the phone but the specific radio chip inside it proved to be unreliable in that setup. Finally I used the dumbest/simplest method; a wifi repeater with an ethenet jack.
Never intending to go so deep I was happy it is still working allright. Looking back I would have approached it differently, if I knew about the animosity to networks in the building.