I had a cheap thermal receipt printer doing nothing, and a son who needed to practice a few skills for school. thermoprint-homework — built almost entirely with an AI coding assistant — turns the two into an endless supply of one-page worksheets: run the server, hit print, get a fresh sheet.
What started as a plain TUI printing basic math problems quickly turned into a small library of “jobs”: unit conversion, decimal division, a division-based cipher, mazes with adjustable difficulty, word search puzzles, chess puzzles pulled from randomly generated positions via a chess library, even a random joke thrown in for good measure. Each one is its own self-contained job that gets queued and printed.
The newest addition isn’t practice material at all — it reads my son’s schedule straight from a Google Calendar via its private iCal feed and prints out today’s tasks, so he’s got a physical slip telling him which chores are due and whether he’s got an activity to head out to, instead of having to ask.
It’s built on python-escpos, so anything ESC/POS-compatible should work, not just the specific printer I’m using. Full job list, config, and setup instructions are in the thermoprint-homework repository.