Thermal printer with a loop of thermochromic foil inserted in it, printing digits of Pi on the loop.The digits gradually disappear from the foil as it exits the printer.

Celebrating The Infinity Of Pi Day With Thermochromic Foil

March 21, 2022 by Arya Voronova 8 Comments

It might take you some time to understand what’s happening in the video that Hackaday alum [Moritz Sivers] shared with us. This is [Moritz]’s contribution for this year’s Pi Day – a machine that shows digits of Pi in a (technically, not quite) infinite loop, and shows us a neat trick we wouldn’t have thought of.

The two main elements of this machine are a looped piece of thermochromic foil and a thermal printer. As digits are marked on the foil by the printer’s heating element, they’re visible for a few seconds until the foil disappears from the view, only to be eventually looped back and thermally embossed anew. The “Pi digits calculation” part is offloaded to Google’s pi.delivery service, a π-as-a-Service endpoint that will stream up to 50 trillion first digits of Pi in case you ever need them – an ESP8266 dutifully fetches the digits and sends them off to the thermal printer.

This machine could print the digits until something breaks or the trillions of digits available run out, and is an appropriate tribute to the infinite nature of Pi, a number we all have no choice but to fundamentally respect. A few days ago, we’ve shown a similar Pi Day tribute, albeit a more self-sufficient one – an Arduino calculating and printing digits of Pi on a character display! We could’ve been celebrating this day for millennia, if Archimedes could just count a little better.

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Thermochromic Imaging

December 19, 2013 by James Hobson 10 Comments

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[clarii_d] is currently finishing up her thesis project on thermochromic pigment to silkscreen receipts. The idea behind it is that when a receipt is touched, part of it fades revealing a hidden message.

As you can guess, thermochromic paint is a type of substance that changes color when introduced to heat — or in this case, fades altogether. Remember when mood rings were all the rage? Same thing.

In her project she is using silkscreening to transfer text onto the back of receipt paper using regular ink. Once dried, she silkscreens an image over top of the message, this time using a thermochromic pigment. The result is a slightly obscured image, but after holding it for a few seconds, it disappears and only the text remains.

Color-changing anything is a bit gimmicky, but we think [clarii_d’s] project is a pretty cool and unique application of it. A few years ago we shared another interesting project utilizing thermochromism; a color-changing clock face that utilized the heat given off by resistors!