[notjosh]

ha, as the author of most of the code on the client side (and thus those beefy requirements), yes it absolutely is possible to use an ESP32! and that’s more along the lines of the original product that inspired this!

however, this was built to be more of a glue library - take whatever device you have (Pi, laptop, IoT fridge), and plug in whatever “printer” you have (typically a receipt printer, but friends have used a rooted Kindle, or Instagram API, etc). there’s more to it than that though, as the original protocol is generic (it was built to control all kinds of devices - printers with blob payloads are a nice side effect), so it’s also relatively easy to extend if you want to bolt on other uses cases within the same network.

it was never really optimised to be the leanest implementation, but instead easy enough for others to hack on and contribute to. JavaScript/TypeScript on a Pi feels like a reasonable compromise, with heavy emphasis on compromise! so, by focusing more on community and simplicity, it’s fun seeing the weird ways people extend it :)