Paintball Graffitti

Paintball as a large format printer? That’s exactly what facade printer is. A paintball gun was mounted with two controllable axes of movement. A computer reads in the image data and prints it out by shooting paintballs to form a dot-matrix display. There’s a couple of wins here, the paintball paint can be washed off, and this will work on coarse or uneven display medium. Check out a video of the printing process after the break.

If you already built your own paintball turret, give the other guys and chance and hack it to print instead of gunning down unsuspecting adversaries.

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/7299485]

[Thanks Jollygreengiant]

26 thoughts on “Paintball Graffitti

  1. Hmm.. I wonder what costs more: paying people to clean up graffitti or subsidizing the cost of water-soluble spray paint so that it is available for less than other kinds of spray paint?

  2. @Hirudinea I was just thinking that myself. For that matter, you *might* be able to do it with just the four print colors (CYMK). I don’t know how it’d work with opaque media but from a distance, it might be that the brain would “fill in” the colors that you want.

  3. @Hirudinea Actually, yeah. If you use a vertical stick feed with the other end attached to some sort of device that loaded the balls in the proper order automatically, you could *theoretically* do the color calculations on the fly. Way beyond what I could do, though.

  4. All you need to know is how many paintballs of each colour you will need in total, then dump them all into the hopper at random, in any order. Use a simple colour sensor in the feed to determine the colour of the paintball about to be chambered. Have the gun move to the correct position for the next pixel of that colour. The control software becomes more complicated, but you don’t need to try and build a complicated hardware multi-feed that doesn’t mangle paintballs.

  5. Silly mean, didn’t read the previous comments. Hah.

    I would think you’d need 3/4 different reservoirs for CYM(K) and a system to load the right one at the right time, then offset the colors like an old CRT TV does so they don’t all hit in the exact same place and overlap each other, particularly bad with yellow.

    At first I was thinking you wouldn’t have the gradation you’d need since each dot is either there or not, but considering that just doing a sparser dot pattern is what you’ve done already there, at a distance it would probably work.

    One way to try it, with the existing system, is make 3 images each designed to be the color of the final picture and then just shoot them on top of each other. I don’t know whether you’d want Yellow first or last. That would be the experimental phase. But it could work.

  6. So far beyond cool!!! Have you had any probs compensating for image distortion angle (from turret) to the top, sides, etc relative to distance from the wall and turret height from the ground? with regard to scale? There could poss be some commercial value too….

  7. For the people thinking coloring using CYMK would work, I don’t think it would. That’s assuming the paint would mix, which I’m fairly sure wouldn’t, or would look pretty horrible. If you wanted colors, you’d have to have the actual color instead of trying to mix it.

  8. lol that place looks like a real life counterstrike.
    on a non-windy day you could use this to get free advertising space on billboards! lol without the climbing and paint cans.
    semi-off-topic: how possible would it be to make paintball ammunition that contains HF instead of paint? and by HF i mean the lighter than air, mix it with water you have glass-dissolving acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fluoride

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