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Building the machine #7 - The infrared sensor

At some point we got it to work. Here’s proof:

However we couldn't keep the motor we salvaged from an old printer running at all times as it would overheat pretty quickly. To make sure its only running if the printer is spitting something out, we added an infrared sensor to the setup, connected it with the Arduino. The sensor triggers when it detects something in front of it, the software keeps the motor running as long as the sensor is triggered and for 5 more seconds once the sensor is no longer triggered, just to make sure the paper goes all the way down.

We mounted the sensor on the top of the folding mechanism with a sophisticated combination of 2 strips of sticky tape. This way the sensor is triggered as soon as the paper leaves the folding tube and heads onto the transport mechanism.

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Building the machine #6 - Fail early and often, especially often

We thought that if you are building a product, you should fail early and often. And man did we succeed at the failing, especially at often failing. here are some of the fails we had while adjusting all of the below:

the position of the transport mechanism

the distance between the acrylic glass and the cardboard that guides the paper

the angle of the folding mechanism

the angle of the acrylic glass and the way it’s fixed to the shredder

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Building the machine #5 - Shit gets serious (with Arduino)

Ok, the problem we were trying to solve was how to make the paper go right into the shredder feed. That turned out to be easy. What? Yeah, that was actually easy. A few pieces of cardboard to guide the paper did the trick.

However, we quickly realized that the trigger inside the shredder needs a lot more pressure from the paper to get triggered. That turned out to be a major problem. 

Many prototypes later, we figured that we need to actively push the paper down into the shredder.

But how?

Our idea was to take the paper transport mechanism out of an old printer and make it push the paper down into the shredder feed.

We decided to use Arduino to power the motor small motor from the old printer.

The arduino went nicely with the cardboard tube to make our setup look even more makeshift. 

We also added a piece of acrylic glass to give the transport mechanism something to push against. By laying the glass directly onto the rolls of the transport mechanism, the paper would get trapped between the two and pushed down into the shredder feed.

Here’s us trying that out for the first time

Close, but not quite there.

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Building the machine #4 - Proper paper folding

So we tested lots of testing different setups for the paper folding. My favorite was a leftover piece of amazon packaging rubbed with lube to make the paper move more smoothly.

Finally we found a proper piece of cardboard tube that we cut in the right shape to guide the paper around as it was pushed out by the printer.

This actually worked!

But as you can see, simply folding the paper doesn’t mean it actually goes into the shredder feed ... so we had a new problem to tackle!

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Building the machine #3 - The first prototype

We already had made our choice for the printer. It had to be fast and efficient, not to big and paper had to come out quite freely on the side or on the top and also support cloud print which we no longer use in the current setup. We opted for a Samsung C410.

Once we got both, the printer and the shredder, we built our first prototype

The first challenge was to get the paper to turn around since the paper comes out of the printer with the face down meaning that nobody could see what was actually being shredded. No good. We started testing a few ways to fold the paper around like here.

That didn’t really work so we thought we’d guide the paper with a cut-out piece of the inner tube from a roll of tissues held in place with bluetak (white tak?) ...

You can see how well that works here:

So, we had to do better on the folding mechanism ...

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Building the machine #2 - The shredder

Well, the idea sounded easy: “Create a machine that prints from an upload and immediately shreds whatever was printed!”. So all you need is a printer and a shredder, right?

Right, but once you start looking at shredders, you find that there is lots and lots of different models. Key criteria

1) Shredding speed. If the shredder is too fast, the joy of watching your upload get shredded is too short.

2) Noise. We run this out of our apartment, and we don’t want to wake up every time somebody uploads something to shred.

Luckily, well known online retailers let you test a few shredders and keep the one that works best. We chose to keep the Rexel Silencio because its quiet and doesn’t shred too fast.

Here are some pictures from our early tests

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Building the machine #1 - The idea

A printer that prints anything somebody uploads to our website and is connected to a shredder that immediately destroys what was just printed. Creation, destruction, transition, mortality, absurdity ... we decided to call it an art project to justify actually building this.