{"author":"gian-reto","children":[],"created_at":"2026-07-17T22:04:56.000Z","created_at_i":1784325896,"id":48952726,"options":[],"parent_id":null,"points":1,"story_id":48952726,"text":"I have been dreaming of a local assistant without a screen or chat window as an interface for a long time. An agent I could just speak to to research a topic or keep me updated. Unfortunately, it turns out audio is not a suitable output medium for every use case, e.g. a news briefing, an email inbox digest, a recipe or many other things. So I built PrintBlocks: a self-hosted service that exposes an API and an (optional) MCP server. Simply hook up your OpenClaw or Hermes agent (or whatever agent harness you&#x27;re using) via MCP. It can compose the content and layout, then send the finished result to your thermal printer, all by itself!<p>The surprising part is how good LLMs are at this. Ask for a morning briefing, and a few seconds later you can have a beautifully designed little document sitting next to your coffee. PrintBlocks gives the agent a set of reusable and flexible building blocks, so it can be creative without messing up the formatting or just printing boring text.<p>The MCP server is entirely optional. If you&#x27;re not into LLMs or have a different use case, you can also use the HTTP API to send requests directly from your own scripts or cron jobs. PrintBlocks currently supports 15 different blocks from text and images to charts and barcodes.<p>This is a v0.1, so if you have any ideas, feel free to open an issue on GitHub or post your ideas here. I\u2019d love to hear what you would print with it!","title":"Show HN: PrintBlocks \u2013 API and MCP server for your thermal printer","type":"story","url":"https://gian-reto.github.io/print-blocks/"}