Perhaps you’ve never considered making your own huge dot matrix printer, buy you have to admit it looks pretty fun after watching the video below.
For a great head start on building your own, start with the Dotter Arduino Dot Matrix Printer PCB from Nikodem. While this listing is for the PCB alone, the entire assembly uses easily sourced parts. An Arduino Uno drives 3 cheap stepper motors and a servo to pull paper through it and stamp dots with a normal marker. Impressively, it can print paper up to 55cm wide, and a theoretically infinite length.
To build your own, along with populating the PCB, you’ll need to buy the components outlined here, and 3D print quite a few items to form the gantry base. In operation, a Processing sketch sends the controller picture information, allowing it to draw huge prints to your heart’s content!
For another innovative printing solution—and one that also pulls the printing medium into it, albeit on a much smaller scale—be sure to also check out this Pen/Laser Bot controller by Bart Dring that we featured last year!
