Rob and I got something called the InkShield, an arduino shield that controls an inkjet cartridge.
Last week I put the shield together and printed out some art. The inkjet cartridge is currently handheld, so you just move it as it's printing (it prints out 12px at a time to get a band).
The shield came with a pre-coded library for text output.
I really appreciate the feeling of moving the cartridge and creating a line of text, almost magically. I wondered about what kinds of scenarios you could use this in; with some accelerometer/sensors, you could print out a block of text or an image, anywhere. Maybe you'd like to save a snippet of text from a book, so you capture it, then print it out in your notebook.
Thinking about digital fabrication, I have this romantic & empowering notion of the human as controller of the fabrication. Instead of machines which take over the control of creation, the technology is there to augment your abilities. A rad example of this is Shaper, a handheld router that auto-corrects the tool to the desired path.
This theme intrigues me and I will definitely want to think more about the kinds of tools you can create which place the interface of (digital) fabrication back in the users' hands.
Those visions aside, Rob and I also want to attach the cartridge to the chassis of a printer to make super fast infinite scrolling dot matrix paper printouts. Like a really large receipt printer. We took apart a canon printer a few weeks ago, which sadly revealed to us that there was no easy way to hack it to suit our needs (it would only print 24" long prints)
