Ο Coffee Drip printer (drop printer brown) is a strange machine created by RIT photography professor Ted Kinsman that can print your digital photos, but instead of using expensive inks uses a little coffee.
The printer is powered by an Arduino microcontroller with 32KB of memory, in which you can store and print an approximately 80 × 100-pixel photo. The photos are low quality analysiss but include the drop quantity term.
“The camera allows you to fully handle the height of the drip, the size of the drop, the distance between the drops, and the end of the paper used for photography. All of this affects the results of the image, ”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.
Scalable motors control the xy placement of the printer head on the paper to be printed.
The machine can use almost any liquid you want, but Mr. Kinsman chose coffee because of low price and availability. See below a video with this printer in action:
