Need to do some guerrilla street advertising? What you need is the ChalkJET 9000, an ink jet printer on wheels.
Using two Arduino Duemilanoves for the brains, this little cart features eight cans of spray chalk which can be individually actuated. Small solenoids pull down on levers in order to spray the cans. Encoders on the wheels of the cart keep track of the spacing in between each pixel as the cart gets dragged along.
A small LCD mounted on the handle allows you to select which text you would like to print, but it doesn’t look like manual entry of new words is possible — You’ll need to load up a library while connected to a computer before hitting the streets!
This was the final project for four UC Berkeley mechanical engineering students back in 2009. Can you imagine throwing a larger version of this onto a car?
[via HackedGadgets]
2009? What is this? Hack-a-decade?
Fail for using two Ardunii, and fail for no free text entry.
With comments like these I wonder if Brian is again going to rethink his liberal commenting policy. :/
Definitely a cool hack! Floats my boat :)
This? This is every day, man.
Makers are somewhat cynical, blunt and realistic. Not to the same degree and maybe that should be tempered but in part that’s what makes them good at what they do. If every comment was only about how great something is, you would miss a lot of potentially helpful feedback.
Well, if the hacker wanted to make it easy enough for almost anyone to replicate, and two is what he needed, so be it.
And free text entry… Not all features comes out on first version. Also, free texr entry might make impulsive language use possible, something the hacker might have tries to discourage
If you want a world where everything is awesome then stick to Facebook. Hackaday comments are raw but real.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0la5DBtOVNI
Something similar was featured back in 2004/2005!
Sure it’s a novel idea, but it really never gets old..
What’s most pleasing about it is the simple idea. A tiny flash of inspiration and the design just spills out from it.
Nike Chalkbot, 2009 Tour de France
Yeah a sneaker company schools the hackers
Epic.. would have been if it used regular sidewalk chalk. Still pretty cool though…
And if he wanted to create more hi-def images, he should put the cans closer to the surface, and put a second row of cans to use, offset in the middle between first row, so he would get double resolution. Inkjet heads work the same way.