Minifax
I built a minifax machine that prints messages sent to me in my room without needing a dedicated phone or mobile number.
I came across this post by Ben James and thought it would be a fun project so I built it for myself. It is a minifax machine that prints messages sent to me without using a dedicated number or phone.
To replicate it, you’ll need two things: a printer and a device that tells the printer what to print. For most people, you could use your laptop for this. In my case, I wanted it to work independent of my computer so I used a Raspberry Pi 5 I already owned.
The whole architecture is this: a user sends a message via a form or a terminal command to an API which adds that message to a KV queue with data and time parameters. My home device intermittently probes the queue to see if there are any new messages and if there are, it pulls it and sends it to the printer.
I built it using Claude.
