🖨 become a founding house
Have a thermal printer gathering dust? Plug it into any computer and
join the swarm. From then on, when someone types a message on
ad43.com, it prints in every house at once — a stranger's
words, appearing on paper in Australia, and your place, and everywhere else,
in the same breath.
Works with Zebra (ZPL) and the little ESC/POS receipt printers
(the cheap USB ones). A human approves each printer before it goes live.
HOUSE #1 ONLINE · HOUSE #2 AVAILABLE
You need: a supported thermal printer, a Mac/Linux/Raspberry Pi with Python 3, internet access, paper, and an admirably questionable sense of purpose.
READ THE FOUNDING HOUSE BRIEF →
✅ Request sent! A human will approve your printer soon. Keep these — they are shown once:
printer id:
secret token:
Then, on the computer your printer is plugged into:
One command: downloads the listener, starts it, and makes it survive reboots
(Mac + Linux + Raspberry Pi; needs Python 3). Your printer prints a
"connection OK" ticket within ~30 seconds — and a
WELCOME TO THE
SWARM ticket the moment a human approves you. Prefer to do it by hand?
Just download
swarm_printer.py
and run it with those two values as PRINTER_ID / PRINTER_TOKEN.
🔒 the boring security part (yes, it's safe)
- Read every line first. The listener is one short Python file with
zero dependencies — no install, no packages. Open
swarm_printer.py
in any text editor before you run it.
- Outbound only. It politely asks ad43.com "anything new?" every 20
seconds over HTTPS. It never opens a port, never listens, never accepts a
connection — nothing on the internet can reach your computer through it.
- It can only print. Short plain-text messages, length-capped and
rate-limited at the server, control characters stripped. No commands, no
downloads, no touching your files (it keeps one tiny cursor file of its own).
- Your token is read-only and only for your printer. We store just a
hash of it, plus the printer name and rough location you typed. No account,
no email, no personal data.
- Leave anytime. Ctrl-C stops it; delete the file and you were never
here. A human also approves every printer before it gets a single message.