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."

You should be able to do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Some guy named Gutenberg made his own printer centuries ago.

Stupid question...

[More Karma Than God]

> ...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.

Re:Stupid question...

[mcdrewski42]

It sounds like you're after something a little like this beastie [printdreams.com].

Basically you wave it over the page and it prints. Don't know how big it scales to, but it is certainly 'any thickness'...

It does look a little like vapourware - but the idea is patented so nobody else should try doing it this way... :) [that's a joke people, not a troll]

Re:Stupid question...

[gi-tux]

Or maybe this [rustoleum.com] will work. It should scale well to any size material and it can cover just about any type of surface as well. Your quality is only limited by your skills.

Sorry I just couldn't resist this one folks :-) But seriously, why does everything have to be robotics? People are cheap today also with unemployment soaring.

Re:Stupid question...

[Dstrct0]

That's closer to what I was thinking, but I prefer this [krylon.com] system :)

Great examples of it's effectiveness on varying surfaces are available here [artcrimes.com], along with some very inexpensive, very interchangeable print heads.

Re:Stupid question...

[Emil Brink]

According to Swedish electronics press, PrintDreams are about to go bankrupt, they are unable to find the funding required to take the product to the market. Which is a shame, IMO, since it's such a cool concept. They have some prototypes, but nothing that is ready for mainstream sales, so I guess it qualifies as (thick?) vapour.

Re:Stupid question...

[ccp]

Don't be an asshole, this guy's question is interesting.

Cheers,

Non-standard inkjet cartridge use

[cybermace5]

We do something kind of similar at work, where we print stuff 24/7 on huge presses running hundreds of feet per minute.

For some of the variable imaging there is row of hacked inkjet cartridges, I think Lexmark with the removable ink-sponge cartridges. They snap off the ink cartridge, and snap in a custom plate with a tube running to a pump and bucket of ink. The electronics are all custom.

I haven't worked directly with them, but even if I did I couldn't tell you any more. I guess you could take it as proof that it's possible...just grab a printer and start playing with a multimeter and power supply. Once you get the right voltage and pin mapping, you're ready to design a solution. If you talk to a professional ink supplier, they may be able to get you an ink formulation that will work in the cartridge...it has to be special. These can work for a long time at a pretty good speed.

Big X/Y stepper drive?

[Tau Zero]

I found something on the use of car alternators as stepper motors (used at least once to drive a router as a "print head") at http://www.tinaja.com/glib/resbn46.pdf [tinaja.com]. But it's got no details. (The bizarre porn sites showing up in the results of my search have to be seen to be believed.) The stuff at tinaja.com seems to be the most relevant; if you are trying to sling a big print head over a large surface and you aren't too concerned with sub-millimeter accuracy, that's probably your best bet.

Interesting... Too bad he can't write.

[JCMay]

I used to respect Don Lancaster. Too bad he can't write. At all.

• For best efficiency, you'll want to flip the switches as few times as possible per cycle. And you'd also like to consistently flip only half of the switches at once. For a further efficiency doubling

• Magic sinewaves whose harmonics can be forced to zero. Or else held to amazingly low values

What? He begins sentences with conjunctions. He employs sentence fragments and makes you guess the meaning. He uses imprecise and vague language

Re:Interesting... Too bad he can't write.

[JCMay]

Whoops that third bullet point was supposed to include

All of a sudden, this rather staid and arcane field is exploding

I would recommend the following as fixes for the quoted items:

• Tinaja.com has been designed to provide instant technical answers, and includes a complete on-line library of Resource Bins as well as other columns. A brand new Synergetics and Consultants' Network and lots of links to unique web sites are also included!

Magic sinewaves have the unusual property that their unwanted harmon

The problems with this approach.

[stvangel]

I don't know that I'd try to use commercial print heads at all, because these are precision devices designed with the idea that they have complete control over the print media - level and movement. You're dealing with devices that operate in terms of thousanths of an inch. I just don't think you're gonna get that level of precision from a custom built device and it would be reflected in the output. In particular, I wouldn't think Color would work very well.

It's fairly simple to build something providing the surface you're printing on is flat. You can build a sturdy 2-d frame to hold the printheads across a flat surface, it's the variable height stuff that is a problem. You could rig something up with sensors that could move the print-head up and down, but I wouldn't try it in anything other than unidirectional myself.

For something of this size, I think you'd be better off trying this with something old. Modern ones would kill you in trying to get the head to be just close enough and at just the right location along the surface.

Karma Whoring Oversimplification

[NanoGator]

"Why don't you just use a paintbrush?"

There, that should get me a +3 Insightful.

Re:Karma Whoring Oversimplification

[Anonvmous Coward]

Sadly that is often the case here. Somebody wants help, and people get modded up for telling them they don't really need to do it.

Barking up the wrong tree.

[sakusha]

Commercial inkjet carts will be worthless in this application. Very large format prints are typically done at 70 dpi, I've seen billboard proofs as low as 15dpi and they look great (well, when seen from billboard distance).
You want something that can blast out huge dots, not microscopic 1440dpi dots. Plotter mechanisms are difficult to engineer with precision at that size. Most of the largest format printers use a rotating drum like Iris inkjets. You should see Metromedia's custom printers, they use drums the size of railroad boxcars. It is much easier to keep a drum spinning at a constant speed and just run a printhead past it at a fixed speed, than to accurately advance paper in fixed increments through a conventional printer mechanism. Trust me on this, I used to be an Iris technician.

Re:Barking up the wrong tree.

[famebait]

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 sur

Re:Barking up the wrong tree.

[Glonoinha]

Jesus this has got to be the best idea I have read yet in this thread. You would only need one air line with a splitter at the end, and you could either run the ink up via small hoses (the air lines for fishtanks come to mind, or just use the little bottles that hang below the newbie airbrush kits to make it even simpler.

The entire exercise boils down to the stepper motor being able to accurately move around the media, and simple solenoids to mash the airbrush button.

Understanding how an old HP pen plott

Re:Barking up the wrong tree.

[sakusha]

I think you missed my point, I mean "huge dots" as compared to 1440dpi, I don't know any airbrush system that could get as low as the 15dpi I cited.

Re:Barking up the wrong tree.

[famebait]

Even with 3 dpi you have way better quality that the spray can system cited, so it might still be an interesting option for the original poster.

And how come the guy that just says I had a good idea gets modded higher than I did? Humpf.

Here you go...

[Fastball]

Your Own Printer [staples.com]

A difficult task...

[stienman]

This is not unlike asking, "I want to take the drive electronics off the hard drive and read and write to the platter with the existing head and motors. How do I do that?"

Not only are different print heads from the different manufacturers driven differently, printheads within a single manufacturer are driven differently. There are several ways to eject a drop of ink from the head, and several ways to adjust its trajectory in the air. I suspect the industry has largely moved to one or two methods that are similar, and I also suspect that the driving electronics are very similar, at least from a high level view.

What you'll find, however, is that each printer has a specific ink, a specific nozzle, and a specific distance to the media, such that you will probably find as many similarities as you will find differences between two printers.

Why is this important? This is the reason why very few people have done this sort of endeavor.

However, you are probably looking for a low resolution (100-200 dpi), and are only looking at doing one of these things. so go get a cheap printer and an oscilliscope and read the voltages present at the head when it's printing. You will likely need to duplicate the voltage and pulse length, but you can probably ignore the pulse shape and perhaps even the slew rate since you are going to have a lower resolution and you won't care if the thing breaks down in 1000 hours rather than 10000 hours.

If you trace the circuitry, you might find they use separate chips to drive the head, and will produce the right logic levels given a simple digital command - some judicious signal hunting will tell you all you need (or some good data sheets). This might give you an edge, since you wouldn't have to create your own drivers.

If you want to try and use more of the printer, then you can hack the sensor that tells it how far along the track it's gone. Just expand it (digitally or by building a new sensor) and then hook its stepper outputs to a higher current drive and have that drive the real stepper. Just magnify everything. You'll have to deal with a low ink output, though, so there's always some gotcha.

Then you get to enjoy trying to keep the print head exactly x millimeters from the paper across the 60" width. Usually this is done with a long, large, rigid drum os some sort and some tensioning drums.

You didn't give us much info though, so I can only answer the question you have, not solve the problem you have. What about your project makes a pen plotter type system inapropiate?

-Adam

Re:A difficult task...

[ccp]

>
This is not unlike asking, "I want to take the drive electronics off the hard drive and read and write to the platter with the existing head and motors. How do I do that?"

No, it's not.

This guy's question resonates with a peev obsession of mine, so I'm going to bore you to death:

Why, oh why do we have to endure printer's makers greed?

I'm from a South American country in the middle of a currency collapse.
Ink Jet printing, until yesterday a no-thought item, it's now prohibitive, so we're running around

transfer?

[TheSHAD0W]

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.

It's a good thing inkjet printers are cheap

[hamjudo]

Start with printers that have a banner mode, that is they can print an 8 inch wide by 60 inch long image.

An inkjet printer precisely moves a print head back and forth above the paper path. That's the part of the printer you want to keep. Another part of the printer precisely moves the paper, you want to replace that part of the printer.

Find the wires that lead to the stepper or servo that precisely moves the paper. Replace that with a larger motor that can precisely move what's left of your printer. You will probably need to boost the power. You can use the old stepper signals to drive opto isolators that drive some big MOSfets. (or a simpler circuit of your choice, that just happens to be how I used my Lego Mindstorms to control some much larger motors. Google for "y3md".)

If you can't dissassemble your printer so that the printhead can scan across your workpiece, start over with another printer. (that's why it is good that the printers are so cheap.)

The next challenge is getting each pass lined up with the previous pass. This is very hard. Don't even try. Instead aim to overlap each pass. At the start of each pass, precisely measure the overlap, and generate an appropriate image to render. It is far easier to measure something than to move something.

Reference : two students built ...

[marcas1]

The article is still there (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3045158.stm )
and titles "Giant printer goes on show"

and related slashdot entry is Giant "Inkjet Printer" (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/07/11172 35&mode=thread&tid=133&tid=137&tid=186&tid=194 )

Good luck

[Deanasc]

I recently priced poster printers for our lab. In theory, at $140 a poster at Kinko's, we'd pay it off in 3 years. But the boss say's no. I'd really be interested in hearing if you got this running.

For me I think the drivers would be the hardest part to come up with. I could tinker with wormgears and other such hardware all day. But I'm not much of a programmer.

Re:Good luck

[bob_calder]

go to a shop that caters to engineers that has some big HP printers. they will come out under the print shops and the mac snobs
I got a ten foot by 3 ft on canvas for under 100 bucks although the ink was not archival

off the top of my head

[leery]

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

What earlier article?

[Chris Pimlott]

I missed whatever earlier article the submitter was talking about... any got a link?

My ideas

[nuggz]

Buy a printer to do it, they exist, they're expensive.They can use ink designed to print on your surface.

Buy a plotter. Glue Paper to surface, laminate or paint it if required.

Attach your printer beast to a CNC rail system. They make home use ones, it might give the rigidity, speed and location control you want.

1 Will work, and can be adjusted, it is very expensive.
2 Standard inks are designed for paper, they are okay for special transparencies. General surfaces they suck.
3 This is a hack, getting proper

HP Designjet or roll your own

[fqrley]

Of course there is the obvious Designjet [hp.com]. But that isn't as fun as putting a scope on the lines to an inkjet head to get an idea of what it takes to make dots. Another idea might be to use an old dot matrix head. Or like the spray paint can printer, but use an airbrush head for finer dots. As far as the programming, once the image is in a bitmap, it would be straightforward to loop through the pixels while stepping the motors.
This project sounds like fun, let me know if you happen to be in the Atlan

I can save you some time. Just don't

[gmiller123456]

I looked into this a while back. Unless you have the ability to make tiny springs and gears, mold your own plastic and metal, you're not going to be able to make one of these things for less than you can buy one (or three!).

The specs for the off-the-shelf printheads are unavailable. And the interface is designed to be difficult to reverse engineer to prevent 3rd party printheads from becoming available.

Re:I can save you some time. Just don't

[Harik]

... yet on the other hand, you can buy stock printheads and all the information you need to drive them from the major manufacturers. Inkjet generally. I know this because we priced them out for a custom address printer for bulk mail (Bills, bank notices, things like that. Not "bulk" in the sense that everyone gets the same thing, "Bulk" in that a bank may have to send out 100k statements a month.)

The reason we were called in to design it was they had an existing system where it printed the page, trifo

It's all been done before...

[ivanmarsh]

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.

You aren't.

Take a look at Output magazine. It's the trade rag for the digital print finishing industry.

Ink jet printers have been used for everything from cake decoration (photo quality image made of frosting. Yum, Yum.), to etching brass and wood.

You can probably buy what you're looking for without having to be creative or inventive at all. Though that might take the fun out of i

simple

[dutky]

First, you need to figure out how to interface to the print head. If you can't find documentation from print head manufacturers, you will need to break out the oscilloscope and poke at your cheap-printer-of-choice until you can get satisfactory control.

Next, you will need to rig a larger ink reservior for the print head. This should be pretty easy if you have any mechanical aptitude and access to a machine shop. You also need to secure a source of compatible ink.

I'm tempted to say you should skip the prin

Turtle

[isorox]

A BBC micro and a turtle is all you need. Simply write a postscript - turtle filter (we did the reverse as Bsc coursework) and away you go. Want colour? Use 3 turtles.

Hand controlled printer

[cbreaker]

There was an article on Slashdot a few months ago with a printer that you kinda "waved" over a surface and it would automatically print dots where they were supposed to go when you waved over the correct position.

From the demos that I saw on the article, it printed some pretty good images.

It was about the size of an old hand-scanner.

Look around, I'm sure you can find it. I just don't remember the name. It would be perfect if you need to print text/basic images on any surface.

Learn from CNC opperators

[axelbaker]

I would build it in the style of a CNC machine. There is plenty of documentation available, I actually know some one who built his own little cnc out of mdf a dremel some stepper motors and a lot of hacking. The beautiful part is the parts were cut on another CNC machine. In addition the controller software is freely available. The suggestion to use airbrush is actually a good one. I have heard of a CNC spray painter that uses standard spray cans to do computerized grafiti. Using the CNC type model

Try this

[YrWrstNtmr]

One of these [sweetart.com] might scale up to what you need.

just find someone

[utexaspunk]

who has one of these [hp.com]. I used one in the CIT [utexas.edu] lab here at UT, but I think most Kinko's or drafting places will do it for you. I've done several large art prints with these, and they can't be beat. Building your own is a neat idea and all, but unless making your own large format printer is part of the piece, I'd stick with the professionals. No need to reinvent the wheel, man.