Pinboard Animation:  “The Nose”

Back in the day, I used to buy dot matrix printers at auctions. They always went for next to nothing, and I could get most of my money back by selling heatsinks and transformers as scrap. My main thing was getting transistors and the rods/bushings for my electronics hobby (typical -- spend $3 for a lot of six printers, get a dozen power transistors, which would cost $20 if bought new, and over five feet of plated and polished rods which sold, new, for almost $1 an inch).

I was always fascinated with how fine the pins in the printheads were and wondered about other uses for them. Sadly, I have to admit I never considered the possibility of using their shadows to create images. To create a block of individually controlled pins would be an engineering nightmare, but the mind boggles at the possibilities.