Draw me a picture

A few years ago, a friend of mine, Arthur — developer and a proud boat captain — told me about an idea he had: connect a mini computer to a printer on his boat and ask people to send him emails. If someone sent one, it would print right there on board. I always thought it was a really great idea. I’m not sure if he ever built it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

So I built my own version.

I dug out my old Raspberry Pi — the one my friend Daniel gave me years ago when I was just learning to code — bought a cheap receipt printer from Amazon, loaded up on paper, and wired everything together. At first I thought I’d keep it simple: just send me a message and it prints. But then I figured, why not go further?

So I added a canvas, and now you can actually draw me something.

The stack is pretty minimal. The frontend is Next.js — a single page with an HTML5 canvas where you draw, and a button to send. When you hit send, it converts your drawing to an image and posts it to a small Node.js API running on the Raspberry Pi. The Pi is connected to the thermal printer via USB and uses the escpos library to render and print the image. The whole thing lives on my local network, with a simple tunnel exposing it to the outside world so anyone can reach it.

The result is here. You go to the page, draw something, sign it with your name, and hit send. It prints immediately on the little receipt printer sitting right here on my desk.

I think that’s kind of cool.

If you have a few minutes, go draw me something. A sketch, a doodle, a note, anything — no rules, no pressure, no artistic skill required. I’m going to collect the ones I like the most, and maybe one day turn them into a little web gallery.

For now, just draw me something.

I’m waiting.