DTS Printer: Spatial Inkjet Printing

Inkjet printing has become abundantly available to businesses, offi ces, and households ever since its commercialization in the late 1980s. Although roughly forty years have passed, the desktop printer is still limited to printing on thin fl at surfaces, mainly paper (Mills 1998). On the other hand, while larger fl atbed printing technology does offer printing on a wide-range of substrates of various thicknesses, it is limited to 2-axis printing and is mainly used for large scale commercial applications due to high machine costs. Motivated by the ambition of printing on irregular surfaces of varied mediums, improving upon high price points of existing fl at-bed printing machines, and contributing to the public knowledge of distributed manufacturing, the Direct-To-Substrate (DTS) printer is an exploration into an integrated z-axis within inkjet printing. To realign a familiar technology used by many and hack it for the purposes of expanded capabilities, the DTS allows a user to manufacture a three-dimensional artifact and later print graphics directly upon said geometry using the same machine. To remain as accessible as possible, the DTS printer is a computer-numerically-controlled desktop machine made from common, sourceable hardware parts with a tool-changeable end effector, that currently accepts a Dremel tool as a router, and a hacked inkjet cartridge