You are totally right, also with the price (I edited the main post) and my non-research !

I didn't research too much, I was driven by impulse when I started the project, I found this blogpost http://reed-printer.blogspot.it/2013/12/review-generic-5890-thermal-receipt.html, then the cheap model on aliexpress, ordered it in a rage-buy moment , forgot about it, printer arrived after a month or so, when it arrived I furiously throw some ruby code into a github project, tested it and used it to create my paper wallets, when I was finished then I made the draft video, created the website, then wrote this post.

I think it's good to have multiple implementations of the same project in different languages, using different libraries and different ways to generate keypairs.

I looked at your code at https://github.com/piperwallet/Piper.git and it's cool, I'm going to try it now!

I found that running the python code on Piper github (I'm no python expert!) I have the current issues/notes to make:
 you should put a link/instruction to install the required libaries like:

- https://github.com/adafruit/Python-Thermal-Printer - installed manually
- installed secretsharing from pip (pip install secretsharing), looks it changed so i had to change the import statement (
from secretsharing import SecretSharer ) and the lines calling it (find "Secret." replace line with --> secret = SecretSharer.from_printable_ascii(ttp) ) - repo (just for reference): https://github.com/rxl/secret-sharing/tree/master
- serializeBTC from here - https://github.com/zimage/python-bitcoinlib/blob/e9506aba6d53ad5bf760d67815d711a1c55b2557/bitcoin/serialize.py (same as above)
- get bip38 from https://github.com/nomorecoin/python-bip38-testing/blob/master/bip38.py ( " )
- pip install scrypt
- pip install bitcoin
- pip install pybitcointools

then I stopped because I noticed that I can't make Adafruit Thermal library work with my usb thermal printer by default, I should make a fork and work to support the generic usb thermal printer I have using python Serial library or by shelling out commands

I aso opened the update-v109.zip ( https://piperwallet.com/updates/ ) and there is a lot of functionality/manuals/documentation there! it should work almost everything out of the box (but needs) if you have this thermal printer.  such a work! much features! much impressed!  


ps I have a RPI model A that is slower but only 25 bucks - also really cheap sd card, but I don't save paper wallet backups there