Coffee Drip Printer | Hacker News Reader

Coffee Drip Printer

cias.rit.edu

180 pointsduck27 comments

Ted's my uncle, and has been doing amazing science photography since I was a little kid. He recently repaired an old scanning electron microscope and has been making images with that.

For Christmas this year he gave me a x-ray image of a pitcher plant (which he did in sections and stitched/colored with photoshop). The trick, he told me, was to grow it himself indoors so that it wouldn't eat any flies, which would show up as blobs in the x-ray and detract from the print.

You can see more of his stuff at http://www.sciencephotography.com/

Good old alma mater, some of those guys really like coffee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffenol

I'd love to see this with water colors instead of coffee. Composite images made from multiple passes would be cool too.

Scroll down a little bit for non coffee examples - they use blue ink, and (cheap) red wine.

Cheap wine is presumed, right? I also presume it's not expensive coffee. The most expensive coffee in the world, that made from Black Ivory beans, is $374 per 12oz bag, or $49.50 per 750ml of brewed coffee (the size of a bottle of wine). I would not be "printing" with this. Although, given these beans are pre-processed by an elephant's digestive tract, I'm not sure I'd drink them either.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/sciencefair/2012/12/07/co...

I'm a bit surprised they're not selling prints.

Someone put a web front end on this, with an approximate preview of results.

While i agree completely, RIT's college of imaging science is a very R&D heavy college. Monetization is rarely a top-of-mind consideration for their projects.

> RIT's college of imaging science

Just a minor point, the coffee printer is from the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences[0], not the Center for Imaging Science[0]. CIAS does have some applied programs, though it has a fair number of pure-art programs. CIS is more R&D focused.

[0] https://cias.rit.edu/

[1] http://cis.rit.edu/

This is a fun alternative:

  http://watercolorbot.com

There is a retro art movement around x-y desktop plotters. (My first "printer" was a plotter and it was magical (if a bit slow) to program and use.

Many people doing stuff like this are just doing it for shits and giggles. They don't want to deal with the business side of things.

I love this. A whole serious of awesome prints could be made with this, that would sell high at art auctions with the right context. Think various fluids ( ahem, conceptual art ), and non-paper substrates. What about gallium onto a metal surface for instance?

Ferric chloride solution onto a metal plate could be nice too. I would think they could also play with doing a spiral raster[1] (which the watercolorbot does pretty well).

1: http://paperjs.org/examples/spiral-raster/

Yeah a la Hirst's spin paintings. :D

Tho..dizziness inducing that spiral raster is.

Moiré patterns.

Also what about doing it in the dark and dropping developing solution onto an exposed print ? :D ( each dot is then a micro pixel which contains the real grain pixels of the photo ) :D

exactly. imagine if damien hirst or banksy created this. These prints would sell for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I'm thinking those little candy dots that peel off.

It would also be interesting to see if different roasts produce different colours.

More important for color is extraction time and amount of ground coffee you use.

Beautiful! So the dot pattern here is "face centered cubic," right? Would you get a better density with a "hexagonal close-packed" pattern? It may make a difference visually. I would love to see a comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-packing_of_equal_spheres (We memorized this stuff in chemistry class and I never saw it again so I may be completely wrong.)

The FCC and HCP lattices are 3D concepts, but you're on the right track. They're using a square lattice, but you could get a higher density using a hexagonal one.

What's really interesting is that they're modulating drop size to change the color intensity through white space and the coffee-ring effect!

Always good to see my Alma Mater on here. Cool project!

Real glad to see RIT getting some love on HN.

Surprised no one's posted stuff from CSH yet.

Me too. (Shout out!)

In fact I just checked https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rit.edu because I was skeptical that what you say is actually true, but it looks like there really are barely any CSH posts on HN, or posts from RIT at all. Not terribly surprising to see an article about John Resig listed there, some things from the CS department too.

Ok I get it.. you put small dots down with anything, it will eventually combine and build up to make a larger image.

Yeah, popularized by many uni students with the rasterbator http://rasterbator.net/Home/Download

There's finally a good use for the “100% arabica bio” coffee substitute we have around here.

Very cool.

its a basic effect in Coreldraw an can be printed with a regular printer ;)

Yeah, but printing with coffee and wine is way more fun.

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