Ο Coffee Drip printer (printer coffee droplet) is a strange machine created by RIT photography professor Ted Kinsman that can print your digital photos, but instead of using expensive inks it uses some coffee.
The printer is powered by an Arduino microcontroller with 32KB memory, where you can store and print an approximately 80 × 100-pixel photo. The photos are low resolution but contain the drop quantity.
"The machine allows full manipulation of the height of the ptaxidroplet size, distance between drops, and end of paper used for photography. All of these affect the image results,” says Mr. Kinsman.
In practice, however, the machine Coffee Drip printer receives a low resolution image and converts it to Pixels. Each of the pixels corresponds to a number from 0 (point without drop) to 256 (the largest drop size). The size of each pixel is controlled by the micro selector to determine how long the drain valve will open. For example, for darker pixels, the valve needs to be open for 63 milliseconds. In this way, the machine can currently make 53 different shades of coffee. However, the results are impressive.
Stepper motors control the xy positioning of the printer head on the paper which is to be printed.
The machine can use pretty much any liquid you want, but Mr. Kinsman chose coffee because of low priceand availability. Check out a video of said printer in action below:
