This is our senior project at Cal Poly Pomona. The objective of this project is to create a machine that will draw an image on the latte foam's surface.
The hardware was designed and created from scratch, with many of the concepts and implementations inspired from x-y plotters and 3D printers. We decided to use the Arduino Uno as our microcontroller board for this project.
A program, written in C#, was created to take in an image, crop to center with a square shape, convert the image to black and white, and provide the Arduino Uno with a binary lookup table. 0 would indicate white, while 1 would indicate black.
Our Arduino Uno uses the binary lookup table to determine when and where the dispenser needs to dispense the liquid to. We also use a form of a shortest path algorithm for a more efficient and quicker print as opposed to how an inkjet printer would print (the print head would move back and forth while the paper slides out).
