Coffee Drip Printer

An x-y axis printer is made by controlling a solenoid liquid valve. Slow and small resolution, but very inexpensive to print with. Here it is printing with blue water color ink, but it mostly prints with coffee. The drip size, and the nozzle distance, and the paper can all be changed. This machine prints with and on anything. In the spring of 2016 this machine was featured on a number of news shows and lots of food and art blogs. Directions are also covered in an article for the Make Magazine blog.

Coffee test print.

Close up of the coffee print.

Coffee print.

Blue ink test print.

Coffee print

Testing out the printer with very cheep red wine.

The prints look very good when the liquid has a low wetting angle on the paper. By changing the chemistry of the ink and thus changing the interaction of the drip on the paper a number of different characteristics can be observed.

In action - the current speed of the printer is 4000 drips per hour - or about one drip a second.