There is apparently a printer that can use spent coffee or tea leaves to print. I love this idea but I would not buy a printer when so many are being thrown away. I pull them out of dumpsters with intent to repair them. So the question is, can they be hacked to work with coffee or tea?
Canon actually disclosed how to hack their cartridges as a consequence of a semiconductor shortage due to coronavirus. So this suggests #Canon could be a candidate for this hack. Has anyone tried it? How precisely do we have to match the viscosity of homemade ink to the original ink?
This is a great concept - it would actually fit my use case for my home printer (use rarely, don’t need it to be perfect) pretty well.
That said, it looks like form factor will be a challenge - the RITI example has tall hoppers sticking out the top, so we’d need printers with similar form factor so it could be cut up.
The firmware would probably have to be replaced so it can manage the different ‘ink’ (different viscosity than stock firmware would expect, etc).
Considering some of the crazy hacks people have pulled off, I don’t doubt it can be done. But the scope (hardware and software mods in one project) probably puts it out of my reach
An even better concept would be a printer that brews your coffee and automatically sucks the grounds down into a reservoir to make ink from. 😜 And then filters the dry grounds into a container you could transfer to your compost bin.
Why stop at composting? Spent coffee grounds can be blended with plastic from bottles and under high pressure form a yarn to make fabric (#coffeeFabric). The fabric could be the medium the printer prints on.
I’m a little concerned that my coffee intake may not be enough to supply my printing needs.
Better have another cup.
That printer was the only thing I found that demonstrates the use of coffee or tea for printing but it’s not how I would hack a factory ink printer. I would not retrofit the printer to have a hopper. There are recipes out in the wild on making the ink on your stove, which apparently goes into a conventional printer. The recipe I found seemed to say boil it down to thicken it, which I would not have much confidence in. So the problem seems to boil down to finding hackable printers (which IIUC rules out HP), and getting the right viscosity.
It looks like there might be some invidious videos on this but my connection isn’t suitable for it ATM.
I think the main problem with this idea is that the only real reason to print something these days is to store some important info offline for a longer period of time. This means the color in the ink needs to be especially resistant to degradation, so that even many years later the text is still readable.
I’m printing stuff every week and it need not be archive quality. Examples:
- notes for a talk (no projector)
- flyers of upcoming events/protests/demonstrations to post around town
- CVs (coffee/tea ink would be ideal if interviewing for a Greenpeace or digital rights gig, toner otherwise)
- snail mail. Copious snail mail. Probably 95+% of the population of humans and corporations use Microsoft or Google for email. Both of those surveillance capitalists block me (based on sloppy preemptive IP reputation) – but even if they didn’t, I won’t even share my email address with #GAFAM pawns because I will not serve as a surveillance capital supporter or allow myself to be part of their data collection. If there’s a non-email means of comms, it’s typically Twitter or Facebook (also non-starters for me).
- patterns for sewing
- paper cheques. Bill pay services are outsourced by banks to 3rd parties. Costs nothing but the privacy is suspect (IOW, they profit from the data sharing). So I’ve gone back to paper cheques. Though coffee/tea ink would not work for this… must be MICR toner.
