Print Messages On Your Beer

Migraineman writes "I stumbled upon a clever hack by Sprite. He reverse-engineered the pin functions on an HP inkjet cartridge and built a simple driver board that converts the cartridge into a hand-held inkjet printer. The driver board is programmed with a fixed message. Moving the 'print head' is your responsibility. Printing messages on a whiteboard was the original inspiration, but printing messages on the foam head of a Guinness is just inspired."

Comments

Obligatory Keats reference

[dpbsmith]

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Epitaph of John Keats, 1795-1821, on his tombstone in the Protestant Cemetary in Rome.

Re:Nooooo!

[Caffeinate]

So those fundamentalists who thought the mark of the beast was RFID chips under the skin were wrong after all . . .

Ink Research!

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, wasting beer????

Now his next step has to be to find an edible ink. An inkjet just flash-boils ink. It has to be possible to do the same to fruit juice, colored water, beer (though the dissolve gas might be tricky), or even just plain water. You just need to clean the cartridge and get a refill kit.

A nice hack that he could sell to bars would be a water-based sprayer to draw the bar's logo/name on the beer foam.

Clogged heads

[ortholattice]

The author doesn't mention that when you are not using the print head, you should put scotch tape over the ink holes to prevent them from drying out, especially for a use like this where the head parking mechanism that normally does this is no longer available. (I do this for half-used cartridges I have lying around for everyday use, and it works well. The official cartridge storage caddies that come or use to come with some printers really don't work too well for preventing the ink from drying over a long period of time.)

If a head is really clogged, if you are brave you can clear it out by literally sucking out the holes. I have been told that if you spit it out right away and rinse your mouth, there is no harm, as long as you don't mind a colorful mouth and teeth for a day or so. As a disclaimer, though, check with your local friendly poison center first before doing this at home. :)

Re:Alcohol abuse!

[S.O.B.]

What we need is pretzel flavoured ink.

Re:Guinness Wastage!

[tomhudson]

The culling of brain cells is a necessary part of organizing the brain along certain pathways and not others ...

For a good example, cats lose 2/3 of their brain cells before adulthood.

Humans lose half

We know that children of about age eight have twice as many brain cells, and twice as many neuron connections between brain cell as do adults. After age 8, the brains of children begin to cull out brain cells and the interconnections between brain cells, and to reorganize its connections.

Think of it as a maze - the culling removes all the dead ends, and keeps the useful highways and roads.

Without this culling, you'd have MORE random posts on /., not fewer :-)

Re:Guinness Wastage!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why rationalize?

You can either have an enjoyable time and then die, or you can live in a plastic bubble and die.

Pray, tell, does *anyone* need the choice to be rationalized for them?

Re:Technically Guinness stout not beer.

[Omestes]

A stout is a beer. I think that the American in you is confusing beer for the nasty pissy lagers they sell round these parts, and while pissy 50% rice lagers are beer, Guinness too is beer. There are better beers than Gunness, btw, try some Young's Double Chocolate Stout, it makes Guinness look like Budweiser. Well not quite, but still. Also support your local micro-brews, up in Flagstaff, Az there is a bar with the greatest stout known to man, I'm sure you can find something like it where you live. :)

Re:Nooooo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Guinness fanboys are like Mac fanboys. They don't actually know what they're doing or why, they just know it's "cool".

Signed,
A Home-brewer.