davidwhitney/printer

Mastodot - Mastodon on a Dot Matrix Printer

This is being made as an installation for Electromagnetic Field Festival

Usage

You'll need to install the dependencies first:

npm install

Then run:

npm run start

The running program buffers incoming toots and prints them out on the dot matrix printer.

Setup

You need a Mastodon account and an access token. You can get an access token by going to your Mastodon settings, then to Development, and creating a new application. You can then use the access token to authenticate with the Mastodon API.

You'll need to create a .env file in the root of the project with the following contents:

INSTANCE_URL=https://mastodon.social
ACCESS_TOKEN=your_access_token

If you're confused and need an access token, once you've created a Mastodon app in your account, you can run:

npm run getToken

And it'll guide you through the process of getting an access token using the client ID and client secret of your app. To run getToken you need to add a few extra environment variables to your .env file:

CLIENT_KEY=your_client_key
CLIENT_SECRET=your_client_secret

The script will launch your web browser and ask you to paste a code in the command line. Once you've done that, it'll print out your access token.