Introduction I recently purchased a thermal receipt printer off of AliExpress for a project. It features both WiFi and USB connectivity which I thought was really cool for the price. To my dismay, I realized after purchasing that the drivers and configuration application only run on Windows. This wasn't a huge deal, as thermal printers generally use the somewhat kinda standardized command set called ESC/POS. Unfortunately while many of the formatting commands are shared between printers, the commands to setup the WiFi connection don't seem to be documented anywhere, and I suspect are device-specific.

I recently made a post about how I was able to configure the new tab page in my browser to display my org agenda. Since then I've been working on another project similar to that, trying to take the concept even further. A while ago I purchased an Inkplate 6 during its crowd funding stage on Crowd Supply, with the exact intention of creating something like this. At the core of the Inkplate 6 is the ESP32.

I've been looking at the PC Engines APU line for a while. They're a line of medium size single board PCs with a DB9 serial connector, no VGA output, and multiple gigabit Ethernet ports. Because of this they're often used as firewall machines. I want to get one and use it as either the home router, or an experimental server to mess around with. Quite a few OpenBSD folks use them and recommend them as OpenBSD router and server hardware.