Students develop award winning human-powered text message printer

1.21 Jigawatts team from Minneapolis, were adjudged the winners among sixteen participating teams at the Red Bull Creation event in Brooklyn. On 10th July, a huge crowd assembled at McCarren Park braving the summer heat to watch the free demonstrations of the competitors, wherein the 1.21 Jigawatts team bagged the award for their human powered text message printer.

Text message printer

The challenge set by Red Bull Creation was not about making printers in particular, but to invent a machine within 72 hours which can make a person to move in place without using fossil fuel energy. The winning design did this job at ease and spent no energy, but instead preserved energy from this operation which it finally used to print text massages.

The team members - Dillon Hodapp, Nathan Knutson, Ben Arcand, and Dave Heisserer, invented a human-sized hamster wheel which allows a person to walk inside and make it revolve. While walking inside the large wheel the person advances forward and alongside produces kinetic energy enough to enable a series of actuator driven spray cans to print a line of texts. The inventors also attached a mobile connection to the machine so that it could receive the print job as a text massage from anyone who knows its phone number.

Text message printer

The working of this printer was demonstrated before a huge audiences and a panel of judges. The attendees were invited to send single word text messages to it. Once the wheel received a text each of the spray cans, suspended from the back of the wheel and supported on two smaller wheels received an array of binary instructions indicating when to paint a spot using dot matrix mechanism. When the Big wheel was turned by walking inside it, the cans started regulating spraying on the paper beneath it. A typical English letter is printed by seven of these cans in five bits. And it continued to print out each of the submitted letters on a roll of paper from left to right as the person in the wheel walked forward. The inventors claimed that the wheel can handle as many as 60,000 one word messages which would probably be enough to print a text string completely around the edge of Manhattan. For their work, the team earned the grand prize of $5,000 from Red Bull Creation, and also received four 40W Hobby Laser Cutters from Full Spectrum Laser.

Via: PSFK