May 25th, 2025
Behind the Scenes
As of today, 4 Tio devices are out in the wild throughout the United States and I’ve ordered parts for a full batch of 25 devices for friends and family! I’m re-arranging my workshop to optimize for device assembly and development.
As you can see, the internals are quite simple with an ESP32 as the “brain” of the operation. Currently, the button wiring longest part of assembly, with soldered connections.
As this is photo is of a developer device, there are 2 separate cables leaving the device for power, but the production devices will have a single DC jack, with power being shared across the ESP32 and printer.
Today, these enclosures are quite sketchy to travel with or ship as there is a ton of empty space in the box for things to rattle around. I just repaired my 3D printer, so I’ll likely be using that to design and print some internals in the Batch 1, such as a mount for the ESP32 and a clean way to store extra thermal paper in the box. I may also experiment with some 3D-Printed cases during this batch. We’ll see!
The buttons and thermal printers have already arrived and I made a run to get ~15 wooden boxes. More ESP32s are en-route as well but I have several leftovers so I’m all set to begin assembling!
May 17th, 2025
New
You can now share your printers with others! Send your friends a sharing link, allowing them to send you little messages (or pictures) to your device anytime.
Additionally, you can also give some people (such as people in your household) extra permissions to edit what the buttons do. Shared devices will appear right next to your devices on tio.computer:
