You may have heard today that BERG’s Little Printer is now available for pre-order. It does look like a great bit of kit & the ability to produce your own content should produce some interesting rolls of paper!

Anyways, before you splash out with your hard earned £199 + P&P you should, you really should have a look at Go free range’s Open Source printer.

Not only are they cheaper than the Little Printer, but being Open Source & built using Rails & Arduino, you can get stuck in to the source code, make changes yourself and create some interesting content.

As part of the Happenstance Project we were fortunate to borrow a couple of Go free range’s printers and start experimenting. We hooked them up with Twilio and a bit of ruby magic to get them recieving SMS messages. Each printer (Cathy & Heathcliff) had their own phone numbers, when they recieved the message, they printed it out & sent the contents to their twitter feeds.

You can read more on this blog elsewhere or you can watch our TEDx talk on the project as a whole.

So, buy all means pre-order a Little Printer, but have a think about getting the super duper Go Free Ranger printer first!