When Ian Earle encountered a common problem with his digital camera last year, he had no idea it would lead to a business that helps chip-truck owners and street vendors.

The third-year computer science student at Dalhousie University has teamed up with classmate Colin White to form Pixel, which is developing a small mobile printer that can operate off of a phone, tablet or computer.

The genesis for the project was the fact Earle couldn’t find a cheap, convenient way to print photos from his camera. He is a passionate photographer and wanted prints from his digital camera without the bother of travelling to a retail outlet.

But the cheapest solution he could find on the market cost $4 a print. So he and White got together to see if they could build something that could do it cheaper.

That’s just what they’ve done.

They’ve created a working model, really an assembly of small circuit boards, wires and a tiny receipt printer, that prints from a smartphone. The battery-powered system uses Bluetooth Low Energy and will initially be available for Apple products, adding Android shortly afterwards.

 “We have a small, mobile wireless printer that can do text printing and any image you want in black and white,” said White in an interview in Halifax’s Volta startup house, where Pixel has set up shop.

Although they are not high quality, Pixel produces basic printouts for about half a cent each. The images are grainy, or to use White’s term, “newspapery.”

They use cheap paper and the image fades within nine years. They only last that long if they’re kept out of sunlight. But the two inventors knew they had something novel and wanted to commercialize it.

 “We didn’t know anything about business,” said Earle. “The only thing close to business that I’d done was a micro-economics course, nothing about minimum viable products or setting a path to market.”

So they took the project to Dalhousie’s Starting Lean course, where they learned about potential markets by interviewing about 100 potential customers. They learned of two possible markets.

Students loved the product because they could take photos at events, parties or on trips and have an instant print to pin to their photo wall in their bedroom.

The more interesting market is street vendors, chip trucks or market merchants. They can use the device to quickly and inexpensively produce receipts anywhere. So someone selling paintings outdoors, for example, can give a tourist a quick receipt, which could be used to claim an HST refund.

After completing the course, Earle and White were accepted as tenants in Volta. They plan to develop the company as they complete the next year and a half of university and have a clear plan for rolling out the product.

They are in talks with a partner that could help them launch a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in February. They hope the campaign will raise enough money to finance the production of 500 to 1,000 prototype units, which would allow them to get a good feel for the market.

If everything is successful, they hope the product will be available on the broader market by April or May.