Via anirudh.me

Black printing ink is one of the most consumed products in the industry. Most of this printing ink is produced in factories with complex chemical procedures. Companies like HP/Canon make 70 percent of their profits by selling these cartridges at 400% margin.

This is not an attempt to win over the pollution. Just a minor itch that led me to build something cool from observations arising from nostalgia of the days back in India.

There’s so much soot/pollution around us, esp. in crowded cities. What if the same could be repurposed to generate ink for printers? 

Rubbing alcohol+oil substrate+soot= lowtech non-uniform ink

For printing we assembled a  Nicolas’ ink shield with arduino interfaced with our Soot-catcher pump design. This shield allows you to connect a HP C6602 inkjet cartridge to your Arduino turning it into a 96dpi print platform. It only uses 5 pins which can be jumper selected to avoid other shields.