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So, today as usual I was filling in my lab notebook, which is
a regular A4-sized bound notebook.
A lot of what goes in there is printouts (for instance,
protocols), which I just print and then paste into the
labbook. Shirley there must be a better way?
What's needed is a battery-powered,
WiFi-enabled printer,
in the form of a rod or squeegee. You send your document
to the printer, and then just swipe the printer smoothly
across the surface you want to print on. The print-head
includes a sensor that detects movement across the paper,
modulating the output accordingly so that, even if you
swipe wobble-wise, the image still comes out OK.
The print-head does not even need to be the full width of
the page - it could be only two or three inches wide and
work like a sort of digital paintbrush: optical sensors would
ensure that the two or three strokes needed to cover a
page would line up with eachother.
Such a printer would be good not just for printing into
notebooks, but for things like labelling boxes and other
things that you can't put through a printer.
This must exist. If you can't see this idea it's because
Google finally turned something up and I've deleted it.
Palmtop Copier
http://www.halfbake...ea/Palmtop_20copier
[Voice, Oct 07 2016]
ZUtA
http://www.zutalabs.com
Baked! [hippo, Oct 11 2016]
Robot_20Car_20Poster_20Printer
[hippo, Oct 12 2016]
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Well, Google has offered me all sorts of label
printers, but they are all crap. And none of them
seems to be usable like a regular printer: they all use
custom software with limited inputs. |
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Why do we keep lab notebooks anymore? For when the
Great Electromagnetic War hits? |
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Odd - I am certain that I've seen something like this done in the past, but I cannot recall the application or how the damn thing worked. It was handheld, cabled, about wallet sized with a cylinder on the printing end. Print quality was dependent on a steady hand... |
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If a cameraphone was equipped with a sufficiently powerful scannable laser, it could burn text directly onto the target surface by identifying two datum points and then stabilizing the targeting using the camera to cancel any vibration or other movement. |
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// It was handheld, cabled, about wallet sized
with a cylinder on the printing end. Print quality
was dependent on a steady hand...// That's the
problem - I want it cable-free, and it should track
its own movement to compensate for wobbliness.
It's got to be doable. |
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//Why do we keep lab notebooks anymore?//
Because they work much better (in some respects)
than electronic lab-books. I can scribble, I can
sketch, I can paste in printed documents or gel
photos, I can cross out, I can squeeze in a couple
of extra lines or side-notes... and I can do any of
these things in a few seconds. |
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Electronic lab notebooks try to cater to these
functions, but they just fail. |
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Plus, I can look back at lab notebooks that are 20
years old. And I'll be able to look back at today's
in 20 year's time. Things like that can be
important. |
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Against that, there is the fact that paper
notebooks aren't searchable or easily indexable.
But that's a small price to pay. Nobody I know uses
electronic notebooks for labwork. |
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I've wanted one of these for years. My uses have generally
been for filling out forms, so a printer that is a single line
of text height that you swipe left to right would work for
me. That would be simpler because it wouldn't require 2D
tracking: just a simple roller. If the user moved it in other
than a straight line they could make curved text. |
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// a single line of text height that you swipe left to
right would work for me.// I've seen things that are
sort of like that, though they seem to need their own
(clunky-looking) software. |
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Maybe the form-factor I'm looking for would be a bit
like an electric shaver (the sort of rectangular ones,
that is). |
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It would have to "print" mirrored then, so you could look in a mirror and read your notes. |
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Pah. My hand-writing is inherently cryptographic. I
was clearly meant to go into medicine. |
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And there are no doubt some medicines meant to go into you ... Here you go now, don't make a fuss ... |
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It's only a little prick ... |
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Shhh, poor [norm] is very sensetive about his ... personal limitations. |
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More deserving of pity than condemntion, really. Didn't your parents ever tell you "Don't mock the afflicted" ... ? ... ohhhh ... |
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Yes, of course not, Silly of us to mention it. |
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Ah - I see that [Voice] beat me to this one by several
years! |
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^ Ok, I lend you my anatomically correct dolls for robots, as a replacement notion. No additional charge. |
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Now sort of baked (see link). Shipping in December. |
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Hmm. The device in the link looks like exactly
what I want, except for the fact that it's crap.
Why have it robotic, when I can just swipe
something across the page with my hand (and have
it track its position, for undistorted printing)? I
bet it can't cope with anything except a very flat
sheet of paper. |
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And why doesn't it also have a scanner head, that
could similarly be used to scan - "paintbrush style"
- from a book page? |
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Why, in short, isn't it better? |
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Ah yes, the question of short again. |
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Gentlemen, there are some things best left undemonstrated. |
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In fact, hang on a moment. |
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The form-factor we should be going for is a wide-
tipped highlighter pen, that Bluetooths to a
computer. |
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In the nib (maybe 1cm wide, 5mm thick) is: |
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(a) A scanner (maybe 100 pixels wide)
(b) An inkjet head (ditto)
(c) An optical mouse. |
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Press the "scan" button, and you can "scribble" all
over an image - the image appears on your
computer as your scribble, so you can see which
bits you've missed. |
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Press the "print" button, and you can "scribble" all
over a blank piece of paper (or cardboard box, or
lab-book page) and the image is printed - if you go
back over bits you've already printed, the scanner
sees that and doesn't overprint; and you "scribble"
in any gaps until the image is complete. |
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For an up-market version, add an SD card reader
and a postage-stamp-sized screen, so you can scan
images to the SD card; or "scribble" images from
the SD card, without needing to link to a
computer. |
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This must be doable. And I would buy one. |
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Idly flicking through the archives, I discover that I
came up with not completely dissimilar idea some
years ago (see
link) |
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[hippo], that's still not what I'm after. I want a
simple "broad pen" or "paintbrush" - style of device
which can either scan or print in swathes, and which
tracks its position precisely as it does so. |
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But, in my defence, that was 13 years ago -
conceptual, made-up technology should have moved on a
bit since then (given enough investment in
conceptual, made-up R&D). |
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All marketing is conceptual and made-up, so you have
to say "conceptual, made-up marketing which only
exists as a made-up concept" |
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