
Coffee Drip Printer - duck
https://cias.rit.edu/faculty-staff/256/faculty/1186
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jmcgough
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/](http://www.sciencephotography.com/)

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

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

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

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ewindisch
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...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/sciencefair/2012/12/07/coffee-
elephants-dung/1753385/)

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

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

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liquidise
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.

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privong
> 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/](https://cias.rit.edu/)

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

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dosaygo
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?

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blacksmith_tb
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/](http://paperjs.org/examples/spiral-raster/)

~~~
dosaygo
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

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

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

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eliteraspberrie
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](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.)

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rsfern
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!

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

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b0rbb
Real glad to see RIT getting some love on HN.

Surprised no one's posted stuff from CSH yet.

~~~
yebyen
Me too. (Shout out!)

In fact I just checked
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rit.edu](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.

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

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hobs
Yeah, popularized by many uni students with the rasterbator
[http://rasterbator.net/Home/Download](http://rasterbator.net/Home/Download)

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

Very cool.

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

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

