Here’s something adequately nerdy to get your blood pumping:
Here’s a little FAQ taken from his youtube page on howsits and the doodads from the video:
“Lego felt tip 110” printer connected to an Apple Mac. This is not mindstorms, I designed/built/coded it all from scratch including analog motor electronics, sensors and printer driver, the USB interface uses a “wiring” board.
FAQ: Track name? “Christopher and Raphael just popper Shinichi Osawa distortion disco edit”
FAQ: How long did this take? Hard to say, maybe 3 weeks working evenings.
FAQ: Just a remake of the 1092a? No, I’d never seen the 1092a until now. However some of the parts came from a 8094 kit amongst others many years ago. It is made to my own design, but I acknolwedge influences and the great work of the official lego designers !
FAQ: Does this use mindstorms? Nope, wiring demo board + homemade analog electronics and sensors.
FAQ: DPI? Dots per inch? Approx 75 DPI
FAQ: PPM? Pages per minute? Maybe 1 is pushing it, I sped things up a little in the video editing to keep it interesting to watch 🙂
FAQ: Helvetica? Yes of course, respect to those who noticed 🙂
FAQ: Full color version/more colours? Originally I was going to do 3 colour version, but I had to simplify as only have 4 lego motors.
FAQ: Open source, schematics etc? Yes, I’ll try to get around to this soon.
FAQ: Wrote your own driver? Yes, how sad is that!!
FAQ: Are? you using some sort of MCU demo board(the black pcb)? Yes. [1]http://wiring.org.co/hardware/
FAQ: re: Mac vs PC abuse? Video not meant as a Mac advert and I’m sorry if the Apple logo offends anyone. I just find them easier to use.
FAQ: Felt tip damage drying up? Yes this is a problem, but one felt tip usually lasts for quite a few pages.
FAQ: Felt tip auto-capping? Nope, sorry.
FAQ: Sensor info: Horizontal positioning using homemade shaft encoder? (black/white rotating lego squares you see in the vid) with a SY-CR102 photo reflector from Maplins, (only £0.89 or $1.30). This is into a sampled analog input as I couldn’t get full enough saturation to trigger the ext interrupt pins. There are also push buttons built into lego bricks for left and right end stop detection.
