printing

22 Articles

Receipt paper mural from above eye level

Massive Mural From Thermal Receipt Paper

November 26, 2024 by 11 Comments

Turning trash into art is something we undoubtedly all admire. [Davis DeWitt] did just that with a massive mural made entirely from discarded receipt paper. [Davis] got lucky while doing some light dumpster diving, where he stumbled upon the box of thermal paper rolls. He saw the potential them and, armed with engineering skills and a rental-friendly approach, set out to create something original.

The journey began with a simple test: how long can a receipt be printed, continuously? With a maximum length of 10.5 feet per print, [Davis] designed an image for the mural using vector files to maintain a high resolution. The scale of the project was a challenge in itself, taking over 13 hours to render a single image at the necessary resolution for a mural of this size. The final piece is 30 foot (9.144 meters) wide and 11 foot (3.3528 meters) tall – a pretty conversational piece in anyone’s room – or shop, in [Davis]’ case.

Once the design was ready, the image was sliced into strips that matched the width of the receipt paper. Printing over 1,000 feet of paper wasn’t without its issues, so [Davis] designed a custom spool system to undo the curling of the receipts. Hanging the mural involved 3D-printed brackets and binder clips, allowing the strips to hang freely with a kinetic effect.

Though the thermal paper will fade over time, the beauty of this project lies in its adaptability—just reprint any faded strips. Want to see how it all came together? Watch the full process here.

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Hacking A Brother Label Maker: Is Your CUPS Half Empty Or Half Full?

July 7, 2024 by 8 Comments

On the one hand, we were impressed that a tiny Brother label maker actually uses CUPS to support printing. Like [Sdomi], we were less than impressed at how old a copy it was using – – 1.6.1. Of course, [Sdomi] managed to gain access to the OS and set things up the right way, and we get an over-the-shoulder view.

It wasn’t just the old copy of CUPS, either. The setup page was very dated and while that’s just cosmetic, it still strikes a nerve. The Linux kernel in use was also super old. Luckily, the URLs looked like good candidates for command injection.

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Retrotechtacular: Circuit Potting, And PCBs The Hard Way

June 15, 2023 by 8 Comments

There was a time when the very idea of building a complex circuit with the intention of destroying it would have been anathema to any electrical engineer. The work put into designing a circuit, procuring the components, and assembling it, generally with point-to-point wiring and an extravagant amount of manual labor, only to blow it up? Heresy!

But, such are the demands of national defense, and as weapons morphed into “weapon systems” after World War II, the need arose for electronics that were not only cheap enough to blow up but also tough enough to survive the often rough ride before the final bang. The short film below, simply titled “Potted and Printed Circuits“, details the state of the art in miniaturization and modularization of electronics, circa 1952. It was produced by the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), the main electronics R&D entity in the UK during the war which was responsible for inventions such as radar, radio navigation, and jamming technology.

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3D Printed Copper Rocket Nozzle Costs Under Two Grand

July 9, 2021 by 19 Comments

You don’t think of hobby-grade 3D printing as a good method for creating rocket nozzles. But [Mister Highball] managed to create a copper nozzle using a common printer, a kiln, and some special copper-bearing filament.

The copper filament is about 90% metal. Virtual Foundry recommends preheating it before printing and you have to sinter it in an oven to remove the plastic and leave a solid metal piece which will, of course, shrink.

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3D Printed Printing Press Turns You Into Gutenberg

February 26, 2021 by 14 Comments

A few machines have truly changed the world, such as the wheel, steam engines, or the printing press. Maybe 3D printers will be on that list one day too. But for today, you can use your 3D printer to produce a working printing press by following plans from [Ian Mackay]. The machine, Hi-Bred, allows you to place printed blocks in a chase — that’s the technical term — run a brayer laden with ink over the type blocks and hand press a piece of paper with the platen.

The idea is more or less like a giant rubber stamp. As [Ian] points out, one way to think about it is that white pixels are 0mm high and black pixels are 3mm high. He suggests looking at old woodcuts for inspiration.

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Use Blueprint Process To Print On Fabric With Lasers

December 18, 2019 by 11 Comments

[Shih Wei Chieh] has built a laser cyanotype printer for fabrics. You know, for art!

How do you get an inkjet head on a shoe or a couch? Most printing processes require a flat surface to print. But hearkening back to the days when a blueprint was a blueprint, a mixture of an iron salt and an acid are mixed and applied to a surface an interesting reaction occurs when the surface is exposed to UV light. The chemicals react to form, of all things, prussian blue. After the reaction occurs simply washing away the remaining chemicals leaves a stable print behind.

[Shih Wei Chieh] uses two galvanometers and a laser to cure the fabric. He uses a slightly newer process which reduces the exposure time required. This lets him print very large pictures, but also on uneven surfaces. As you can see in the video, viewable after the break, the effect is very pretty. There’s a new way to have the coolest pen plotter on the block.

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Hacker Abroad: Vietnam’s Hardware Hackers

March 27, 2019 by 5 Comments

One of the unfortunate things about Hackaday’s globe-spanning empire is that you often don’t get to meet the people you work with in person. Since I was in China and it’s right next door, I really wanted to pop over to Vietnam and meet Sean Boyce, who has been writing for Hackaday for a couple of years, yet we’ve never met. I suggested we could make this happen if we put together a meetup or unconference. Sean was immediately confident that the Ho Chi Minh City hardware hackers would turn out in force and boy was he right! On Sunday night we had a full house for the first ever Hackaday Vietnam Meetup.

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