Heh I wonder if this can be adapted to make tatoos on your arm. Done in five minutes!

Posted at 12:05 am on Apr 12th, 2007 by curious george

sweet updated before midnight. too bad it cant make music

Posted at 12:12 am on Apr 12th, 2007 by bird603568

Wow, this hack is just insane.
The hugely complex DIY involved.
Also, I think you meant ball point pen, not pin,but no biggy.

Posted at 12:45 am on Apr 12th, 2007 by mastershake916

I remember coming across this a while back, I’ve always wanted to try it, but haven’t ever gotten to, maybe I can try using a floppy drive instead of the solenoid seeing as they are super abundant

Posted at 1:04 am on Apr 12th, 2007 by Ziggit

Is it really a dot MATRIX printer if there’s only one pin? :-)

Posted at 3:45 am on Apr 12th, 2007 by Tom

Gotta love Fischertechnik for mechanical prototyping!

I wonder if he got his ideas from the Fischertechnik Plotter kit from 1985 (they also offered a simpler version way back in ‘77)…

http://www.ulrich-mueller.de/plot85.htm

Posted at 8:55 am on Apr 12th, 2007 by agent420

The whole site is well worth spending some time at. Dude seriously must have way too much time to create some of the crazy stuff.

Posted at 9:36 am on Apr 12th, 2007 by thetable

Hey, check out his brother’s site too– he has a pretty good writeup on his build of a cnc pcb router.

http://cq.cx/pcb-router.pl

and this: mechanical pong –
http://www.cyberniklas.de/pongmechanik/indexen.html

Posted at 11:45 am on Apr 12th, 2007 by stillboy

@Tom: you can have 1-element matrices, so yeah.

Posted at 12:07 pm on Apr 12th, 2007 by Groxx

i was going to build something like that once but with a led pencil and then make a text fort that was copied from my hand writing then i could write papers for school and type them with spell check and other stuff like that you should consider trying something like that i would like to see how it turns out.

Posted at 10:43 pm on Apr 12th, 2007 by drew

what time zone are you in will? because it’s 12:47 am where i’m at and i don’t see the next days hack ;)

Posted at 1:47 am on Apr 13th, 2007 by austin y,

Yes, it is. “Matrix” refers to the patterns of dots making up characters. It has nothing to do with pin configuration of the head.

If it did, even real matrix printers wouldn’t be considered “matrix” printers, because their pins comprise a single, vertical line, not a grid.

Tom said:
>Is it really a dot MATRIX printer if there’s only >one pin? :-)

Posted at 1:24 pm on Oct 13th, 2009 by Ishkabibble

Back in the day I had a Silver Reed EXP 400 “Daisy Wheel” printer. I could print flowcharts on it. It did that by using only the “period” to bang out the lines. Of course printing out a 1 page text only resume took 7 min so you can imagine how long it took to print a one page flow chart.

Posted at 1:42 pm on Oct 13th, 2009 by Chris