There are cheaper and quicker ways of getting your hands on a printer — but hackers and makers will at least give credit to the creator of this music-playing printer/typewriter for its originality.

Computer scientist Chris Gregg of Tufts University has turned his vintage 1960s Smith Corona electric typewriter into a printer that punches its keys along to music.

With about $50 in your pocket, you could run to a local store, grab a printer and get it working all in about half an hour — but this labor of love cost Gregg years and likely a lot more money. Originally, he had planned on driving the keys with his computer, but when he discovered that they were not electric switches at all, but rather powered by a complex mechanical system, he decided to shelve the project.

However, he started again this spring, when a friend at Tufts suggested using miniature electromagnets called solenoids to drive the keys instead. So, Gregg got his hands on 48 solenoids – one for each key – and reignited his crazy printer project.

Countless headaches and many long hours later, Gregg had a working printer. Along with one of his Tufts students, Kate Wasynczuk, he designed a special board — using shift registers that were powerful enough to drive each individually wired solenoid. The customized board is operated by an Arduino Uno microcontroller, which is fed data through a simple application Gregg wrote to allow printing directly from a computer. The invention doesn't just type out what you print — it can do so to music, with each noisy stroke of the typewriter acting like a miniature drum.

Gregg programmed the machine to play percussion for Leroy Anderson's "Typewriter Symphony," including a section written especially for the new device. It might be slow and the mess of wires and solenoids doesn't look very sleek, but it's pretty cool nonetheless. It's great to see the lengths people will go to in adapting old technologies.

If you're a hacker or maker dying to produce your own musical typewriter/printer, you can find more detail about the project on Gregg's website. If that seems like a little too much effort, maybe just watch the invention perform its symphony in the video below.

via Hackaday