Hacks & Buildsgithubraspberry-pireceipt-printerwebhookscloudflarephpmaker
Star Andrew Schmelyun's GitHub Repo and a Raspberry Pi Prints Your Profile Picture on a Receipt Printer for His Wall
Developer Andrew Schmelyun wired a GitHub star webhook to a Raspberry Pi and a used Epson receipt printer, so every star on his print-my-profile-pic repo prints the starrer's avatar in a paper frame for a pinboard he calls the Hall of Frame.
The whole README pitch is two sentences. “Star this repo to have your GitHub profile picture framed, printed out on my receipt printer, and stuck to my wall. That’s it!”
Andrew Schmelyun set up a GitHub webhook for one event, a star. When someone stars the repo, GitHub posts a payload to a Cloudflare Tunnel address that leads to “a PHP script running on a Raspberry Pi that’s sitting on my desk.”
The payload carries the starrer’s display name and avatar URL. The script, he wrote, “takes their profile picture, renders it behind a cut-out of a photo frame,” adds a few details, and hands it to the open-source escpos-php library, which talks to an Epson TM-T88IV over USB. The receipts go on a pinboard he named the “Hall of Frame.”
Asked why, the README answers in one line. “It sounded fun when my friend Sam mentioned it. That’s pretty much it!”
There’s a small upsell. A one-time GitHub sponsorship “of any amount” gets your picture printed in a “special frame,” and the repo’s frames folder holds three regular frames and three special ones. He also takes new frames by pull request.
The printer has done this before. A year ago he wrote up ping.aschmelyun.com, a page where anyone could type a message that printed on the same desk, and he reported “well over a thousand different pings from people all around the world” in about a month. Back in 2022 he built a printer for GitHub issues.
What the repo doesn’t hold is the PHP script itself; it’s a README and six frame images. If the stars keep coming at this rate, the open question is how much wall the Hall of Frame has left.
Maintainers who copy this as a thank-you for stars, sponsors and first contributors will find it’s a short setup with parts many of them already own. The catch Schmelyun hit on the earlier build applies here too: his printer’s built-in character set turned emoji and box-drawing characters into question marks, so anything printed from strangers needs a filter first. Which event in your own week would be better as a strip of paper than as one more notification?