The Coffee Drip printer 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 a little coffee.
The printer is powered by an Arduino microcontroller with 32KB of memory, where you can store and print an approximately 80 × 100-pixel photo. The photos are low resolution but include the droplet quantity term.
“The machine allows full control over the height of the drop, the size of the drop, the distance between the drops, and the end of the paper used for the photo. All of these affect the results of the image,” says Mr. Kinsman.
In practice, however, the Coffee Drip printer takes a low-resolution image and converts it into Pixels. Each of the pixels corresponds to a number from 0 (no droplet) to 256 (the largest droplet size). The size of each pixel is controlled by the microcontroller to determine how long the drain valve will be open. For example, for the darkest pixels, the valve is required to be open for 63 milliseconds. In this way, the machine can currently make 53 different shades of coffee. The results are impressive, however.
Stepper motors control the xy positioning of the printer head on the paper to be printed.
The machine can use pretty much any liquid you want, but Mr. Kinsman chose coffee because of its low price and availability. Watch a video of the printer in action below:
