Nickel-O-Matic

coins

[Mike] sent in this project. It’s a robot, designed to print on wooden coins while people watch. It was built to be in the iHobby Expo 08 in Chicago. The main movement is controlled by a BASIC Stamp2, while the ink jet system is run off of a Propeller. The entire system has 4 servos, 3 stepper motors, a DC motor, a hacked breast pump, an ink jet head, and 5 IR sensors. in case you missed that, it has a breast pump. We’re assuming that’s the part that picks up the wooden nickels with suction. He states that the project was meant to be entertaining, so there are lots of superfluous and inefficient actions as you can see in the video after the break. Great job [Mike].

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F_ifyc5cVc]

19 thoughts on “Nickel-O-Matic

  1. It would be cooler if it didn’t use an inkjet print head, IIRC most wooden nickels are burnt with the info, I’d have experimented with burning in the image somehow, perhaps a ‘print head’ made with a heated matrix of pins? Or at least burn in one side with the machine info while variable-printing the back.

    Maybe they were avoiding smoke. Besides, woodburning heat would be harder to manage, I guess.

    It might be cool to do something similar with clay poker chips, but mill the design into the surface.

  2. Shame the Parallax printer kits are NLA. Would have rather liked to have a play with one of those… :-(

    Oh well, there’s always the option of using a variant of Sprite’s “inkjet stamp” hack and a HP #40 cartridge…

  3. Just as a note, this does not use the Parallax inkjet printer kit.

    The inkjet head is pulled from an old ThinkJet and the head is driven directly from the Propeller chip. This is something that anyone can build today and you don’t need to buy anything commercially and you have a lot more control over that the head can do than with the Parallax kit. The code I have on the Parallax website for the Propeller chip would likely get someone started. Mike

  4. if you are still commenting; can you give a description of the machined part that holds your bearing? Or how about a word or two about where to learn how to do it, thanks.

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