It’s already the 5th of the month, and we’re back at it again.
We’re writing to you from the Every Thesis conference at Pioneer Works. We’re having conversations with artists, technologists, founders, and operators about what great human work looks like after this wave of automation. Josh Miller, the founder of The Browser Company, began with a provocation: what we need are new ideas, and those new ideas exist within us. AI can help us express our ideas more fully, but won’t be the engine of new ideas itself.
That view resonates with us. We’re feeling an incredible sense of empowerment with the tools at our disposal. Many fields that might have been out of reach before suddenly feel accessible. Yes, these tools can degrade our cognition faster than TikTok when used mindlessly. And yet, when used from a base of curiosity and action, they’re more invigorating than other waves of technology in our lifetime.
We told you a couple of months ago that we won a MetroCard Machine from the city’s auction. Well… we finally received it, and despite the arcane hardware inside, we’ve made lots of progress bringing it back to life with new capabilities. We’re going to do a dive into one part of our reverse engineering journey today. Follow along at 5×5 Collective’s Instagram account for more!
Bringing the MetroCard Machine back to life
The City promised us a MetroCard machine, but also promised that it would NOT be functional. They were very accurate.
When we picked up the MetroCard Express Machine (MEM) from their depot, we realized it was likely de-installed, put in their warehouse, and never touched again before our delivery day.
We’ll spare you the details of hauling this big boy back to Black Brick Project and squeezing it between narrow doorframes to sit inside Nikhil’s studio; just know it took 4 dudes to take care of this thing.
We’re lucky to have Nick Wallace, a seasoned hardware engineer, leading our efforts in understanding and revitalizing the MEM. Nick’s first task was picking the broken lock on the door so that we could see inside the machine and begin to analyze how it worked.
Keep in mind: there are no manuals. The city department we’ve worked with has no knowledge of how these work. Most people receiving these machines just want theirs for decoration.
But we’re crazy nerds and we want to get this thing working again.
Luckily Nick took one glance at the internals and knew what kind of beast we were working with.
We’ve made a ton of progress on this machine. Instead of giving a broad overview of everything, let’s instead drill into one component: the receipt printer.
Reverse Engineering the Receipt Printer
Here’s where we started, and where we got:
Remember: Nick is an engineer. Even though we began with what appeared to be an antiquated rat’s nest of cables, Nick had a very systematic approach to testing the hardware. Whether you know all of the terms below or not, consider this a window into the process of an engineer making sense of a system starting from low-information. There are lessons in here for all of us:
1. Powering it on and trying the obvious stuff
Nick first identified right away that the printer talks to the rest of the machine through a serial port, an old-school connection that sends data one bit at a time. He found the right port among the 11 serial connections on the machine’s motherboard, and powered it on. That part worked. Phew.
There’s no manual for this printer, but Nick found one for a similar model online. He first wanted to see whether he could just print some text. He tested the printer's native command set and the industry standard ESC/POS set. Basic text formatting worked, but ESC/POS did nothing.
He did, however, get our “Hello from the MacBook!” message to print.
2. Digging deeper
Nick quickly learned the quirks of the machine as he probed what it was capable of: it needs a short pause in data transmission between lines, and paper slips that are too short get stuck in the exit chute. He wrapped those rules into a small piece of software so every test after that behaved the same way.
Nick was looking for a set of commands that could get beyond basic text formatting and let us print cooler stuff. Flipping the board's switches one at a time with a print for each test told us what they controlled, and confirmed there was no hidden mode for a more capable command set.
3. Brute force testing
With the power of Claude Code at his fingertips, Nick had scripts print a bunch of tests. He photographed the slips and fed them back to Claude, and a catalogue of what worked slowly built up.
This step alone might have killed the project in the past due to sheer manual effort (and corresponding boredom). But instead, our machine assistants cranked and got us pointed in the right direction.
4. Opening up its brain
But still… no pictures, no QR codes, no good 8bit images.
Nick pulled the firmware chip, which holds the printer’s built-in instructions, and copied it with a chip reader, keeping the original safe. Claude translated the raw machine code back into something readable and traced how the printer handles each command.
It turned up features we’d never have guessed: barcodes, extra fonts, finer paper control. It also flagged the commands that permanently overwrite the printer’s settings, so we could steer clear of them.
5. Teaching it a new trick
The printer, we learned after many attempts, can’t really draw pictures. It only prints letters.
But it turns out that it keeps those letters in memory as tiny grids of dots. So instead of building a graphics engine from scratch, we slipped in one tiny command that lets us redraw any letter. Redraw enough of them, line them up, and you’ve got a pointillist-meets-8bit picture.
This new firmware went onto a spare chip. Then we tested in small steps: did it behave exactly as before? Then the remote reset, then one custom letter, then a scannable QR code, then pixel art and photos.
Et voila — the printer is in business. You can just do things now, with a little help from our agentic friends.
Follow along on IG, where we’re sharing more of the process.
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Events from the 5×5 Collective Community:
Lindsey Lerner is showing a curated set of her Field Notes portraits and stories at Fabrik in TriBeCa. Field Notes show the largely invisible practices behind Lindsey’s creative subjects.
The show will be on indefinitely, although the subjects will rotate periodically.
Kirsten Batten Leach has three works on view at A.I.R Gallery in Dumbo. Her show, Catalyst Carrier, uses durational material forms such as oxidation, corrosion, and extracellular digestion to describe the interactions between bodies in care environments
The show will be on view until November 8, 2026.
A long-form piece for the road:
Our friend and contributor Harish shared this long-form piece about a young man’s epic, tragic attempted journey to cross Canada into Alaska with his dogs. His fascination with a more primitive way of life took him to corners of humanity that few of us will get to experience, but ultimately cost him his life. It’s inspiring and awe-inducing, albeit sad.
Till next time,
Nikhil & Jon