Intro

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Summary

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In this chapter, the speakers share their experience of a hack week project focused on creating a receipt printer using JavaScript. They discuss the project's motivations, functionalities, and the integration with error tracking tools, along with the challenges and excitement of hardware collaboration.

Wes unveils his Hack-Week project —a thermal printer controlled by JavaScript that prints out Sentry.io errors in real-time. Scott and Wes dive into the nitty-gritty of how it works, from the ESC/POS protocol to tackling socket issues, and whether the project was worth the effort.

Show Notes

00:00 Welcome to Syntax!
00:38 Brought to you by Sentry.io.
01:10 What is Hack Week?
01:41 The project.
- Follow the posts on X.
02:40 Why a receipt printer?
03:55 How do these printers work?
- ESC/POS.
05:20 Communicating with the printer.
07:24 ESC/POS Encoder.
ESC/POS Encoder.
08:42 Socket issues.
09:56 Using Transformers.js to stop ‘toxic comments’.
- Xenova’s toxic-bert.
- Implementation in Wes’ code.
10:48 Back to socket issues.
12:18 Integrating with Sentry.
15:01 Printing images with Playwright.
16:17 Was it worth it?