Set up your own secure & private networked released tool

Materials:

• Raspberry Pi [RPI] w/ Raspberry Pi OS (full-version)
• TTL Thermal Printer (adafruit mini thermal printer recommended) w/ paper refill rolls
• paper shredder (any shredder will do - you can find mini electric and mechinical ones online for less than $20)

Process:

1. Secure a domain name (ex: website.com, internet.net, etc.) or sub-domain & certificate to enable HTTPS security for your server.
   • Students can recieve 1-year of a free domain name (& certificate as well) via the GitHub Student Developer Pack offers.
   • Anyone can recieve a free certificate for their domain using Certbot by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
2. Once you have a domain, find the IP address of your RPI & attach your domain to it using your domain provider's admin panel.
   • NOTE: If you want your papernet to be able to recieve messages from outside of your home network you may need to look into port-forwarding or tunneling. Do your research and note security risks of exposing your home network to the public internet.
3. Once that is all settled, retrieve your certificate & generated key and place it in a non-public (very important) directory on your RPI.
4. Git pull this repo & enter the paths to your printer, certificate & key where noted.
5. If this is your first time working with a RPI, see the linked guide to set up your Pi with Raspberry Pi OS.
6. with both the RPI and printer unpowered - attach the thermal printer. The ground, RX & TX pins pictured below are where you want to connect the two. Black to ground, Yellow to TX, Green to RX.
7. Time to power it all on so you can configure & test your printer! If your printer came with a test printout in the box, look at it closely for voltage and baud rate. Either way follow steps in the Adafruit tutorial linked here to enable printing via lp & over the network on your printer. Be sure to only follow steps relevant for TTL printers - USB steps do not apply.

• Note: if your printer is still printing gibberish try making sure the voltage is correct & rebooting.

7. Now that your thermal printer is all set up, time to run the server & give it a try! With the thermal printer & shredder powered on, run the node server from your RPI.
8. Lastly, navigate to your domain or sub-domain on any computer or smartphone on your network to send a message & watch it shred ~

That's the gist! Feel welcome to reach out with any Qs.