LEGO Hello World! A Felt Tip Lego Printer Powered by Apple Mac That Can Actually Print, by Adam (horseattack)!

You know when were kids playing with our LEGO’s thinking of all the stuff we could create with it? Well, Adam actually created something of actual use — the Mac powered LEGO felt-tip printer with 75 DPI!

It may not be cheap or efficient, but it’s FLIPPIN AWESOME!

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.