It is surely the largest dot matrix printer in the world. Use the road as paper, and the result is quite impressive.
A handyman youtuber has become your pickup truck into a giant dot matrix printer that prints on the highwaywith the help of a Raspberry Pi.
The system used is very ingenious, and it works surprisingly well. How can you turn a van into a giant dot matrix printer?
The dot matrix printers today they have been surpassed by those of inkjet, or lasers. print using pointsdividing the letters into groupings of points, as if they were pixels.
The printer van
How can you turn a pickup into a printer? What this youtuber has done is place, in the back of the van, a series of solenoidseach of them in charge of printing a dot of the matrix printer.
A solenoid It is a physical device capable of creating a highly uniform and intense magnetic field inside, and very weak outside. Through electrical signalscan open or close a valve very precisely.
Solenoids are used, for example, in irrigation sprinklers. And that’s what this experiment is about, since the printer prints on the road with waterso as not to cause trouble. So messages only last a few minutes.
After installing more than a dozen solenoids in the back of the truck, he connected them to a Raspberry Pi, which in turn is connected to a laptop.
From the laptop you type a textwhich the Raspberry Pi converts to pointsand each point is assigned to a solenoidby means of an electric discharge. You can see it in this video:
The result is surprisingly good. The texts read very well.
However, due to the size of the solenoids, have to be read from a drone, at a high altitudeso that they are seen with the correct perspective.
This van turned into the largest dot matrix printer in the worldthanks to the magic of Raspberry PiIt is a DIY that has surprised us, because it works really well.
