Sans Inkorporated

A pencil printer that allows users to cheaply and efficiently print basic documents from home by using pencil lead instead of expensive and finicky printer ink cartridges.

Improve your life with Sans Inkorporated.

Motivation

The existing printer market for home applications is saturated with examples of dirt cheap inkjet printer hardware, and incredibly expensive ink cartridges. Home users who spring for inkjet style printers are typically looking for inexpensive and simple solutions for basic printing applications.

Innovation

The pencil printer uses pencil lead - a medium commonly found at home, to substitute expensive and proprietary printer ink to allow for easy and cheap home printing. We provide a simple and environmentally friendly solution to your everyday printing needs.

Design and Development

Using a microcontroller and high-precision motors which are driven by our custom printing software, we will guide a pencil across the paper, delivering clean, editable, and readable documents.

Competetive Analysis

	Print Vector Images	Print Text/ Rasterized Images	Low Cost/ Maintenance	Environmentally Friendly	Manually Fix Errors
Inkjet Printers	✓	✓
Pen Plotters	✓			✓
Sans Ink. Pencil Printer	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

Media

Image Gallery

Videos

Design.

Functional Requirements

Must be able accept print instructions from a computer
Must be able to print vectorized images
Must be able to print text
Must be able to print color
Must be able to fill (hatch/cross-hatch)

Perforance Requirements

Must be able to cover a majority of a standard 8.5" by 11", (minus margins)
Must generate lines of consistent thickness and sharpness
Printing time per page should not exceed that of a typical inkjet printer

Technical Specifications.

Design

The printer will consist of a motorized writing-tip mounted on an XY track to effectively cover an 8.5" by 11" sheet of paper with text or vectorized images.

Hardware

3 Linear Guide Systems
2 High Precision Stepper Motors
2 Idler pulleys
2 Timing Belts
6 Pillow Blocks
6 Shaft Collars
Servo
Shaft
Arduino Uno
A Pencil

Software and Protocol

We will be making our own custom software for communicating with the printer. It will take in a vector picture or text file and tell the arduino how to print it. We will also automatically vectorize non-vector images and print them. Communication with the printer will occur through a serial protocol.

About us.

As a group of Electrical and Computer Engineering students, we look forward to exploring the challenges involved with this project, both mechanical and software related. We envision a world where we can print environmentally friendly, editable documents from the comfort of our homes.

SansInkorporated