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Creating Your Own Printer?
hajo asks: "I am in need of a Large (60" plus) printer which can print onto any thickness material for a specific art/robotics project. I loved the earlier Slashdot story where the two students used two motors and an inkjet can for large mural prints; but I need a higher quality end result. I can build a plotter mechanism with two PC controlled stepper motors; But I would like to find out how to use head the parts from a cheap inkjet printer. Where can I find info on the hardware and drivers for such a project. I have a hard time believing that I'm the first who wants to use the ink jet head parts of a printer to do something with them. Any hints, tips and URLs deeply appreciated. I believe this project will make for an interesting read and as thanks for any help I will keep the Slashdot community informed of any results."
> ...which can print onto any thickness material...
How thick is "any thickness"?
Ten meters? More?
This is potentially a very big printer unless the entire printer sits on the top of the material in question.
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I would recommend you print on smaller sheets and transfer the ink to the surface, rather than try to create such a large printing device. I do know they make sheets designed to "iron-on" transfer to other surfaces; whether the surface you plan to use is appropriate, I don't know.
You want something that can blast out huge dots
Good point. As a variation on the spray can idea, for really huge prints, normal airbrush gear comes to mind as the perfect candidate for a homebrew system. Small bulk, good dosage control, low requirements for precision, but high potential if you can fix it, and you can feed them paint and compressed air continuously through tubes.
You would still need to build a harness, driver circuits and software to raster-scan your print head across the surface (the surface probably being horizontal and stationary), and a computer controlled valve for the airbrush, but that's about it.
If you draw with discrete dots you could make do with just on/off control for the valve,and use timing to vary intensity.
For full color you should probably mount all channels on the same write head, to avoid lining up passes. You could have them in a circle pointing down diagonally on roughy the same spot on the media, or in a line after each other and stagger the input appropriately.
If you want to increase printing speed, have it spray continuous scanlines in stead, controlling intensity by varying the flow rate. But this sounds like it needs a whole lot of work and calibration...
But speed could very well be a major issue here: Let's say you ended up spending an average second per pixel you would need more than 3 days to print out a puny 640x480 image...
sudo ergo sum
pun! seriously, though, the simplest way i can think of is to hack a plotter mechanically by replacing the paper roller mechanism with a sturdy stationary frame, so that instead of the paper moving under the plotter heads, the whole plotter moves over the paper (or whatever surface). you could then just sit the frame on the surface and the plotter would move over it, drawing inside the frame.
media thickness or stiffness wouldn't matter because the device sits right on the surface (as long as the surface is flat). if the piece is bigger than the frame, plan it out and split the graphic into tiles (have the plotter draw some light hashmarks that you'd match with marks on the frame so that the tiles line up). it should be simple to program automatic segmenting.
if it makes the concept any clearer: you'd basically have a logos turtle (or a gang of colored turtles), running around on top of your medium. or is it a giant etch-a-sketch?
good luck. however you solve the problem, i hope you post the results!
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