3D Printer Tattoo Machine

Coming steps closer to a dystopian future ruled by robotic tattooers, a group of students in France hacked a Makerbot Replicator 3D printer to create a DIY tattoo machine, entitled the 3D Printer X Tattoo Machine project.

According to 3Dprint.com, the team, led by Pierre Emm, participated in Public Domain Remix, an event hosted by the French Ministry of Culture, in which the students had eight hours to hack an electronic device (with some help from LeFabShop).  Here's more:

What the group did was replace the extruder of the printer with a pen. This allowed the machine to draw on a person just like they were getting a tattoo. The students were not ready to stop there, so they set out to replace the pen with an actual manual tattoo instrument, and it actually worked. They first tested the machine on an artificial skin material, and found that it worked great, but if they were to proceed on a real human being, many precautions and precise calculations had to be made, and more importantly they had to find a volunteer who would become the "guinea pig" for this procedure. Amazingly, finding someone to volunteer was much easier than they thought.

Instructables has step-by-step instructions on the 3D Printer X Tattoo Machine. And check the video below to see how it works.

This isn't the first robotic tattoo, however. As we wrote back in 2011, in our Auto Ink: Chris Eckert's Automatic Tattoo Machine post, artist Chris Eckert created a robotic sculpture that tattooed a symbol on a person's arm (and not a symbol of the person's choice). 

I love the intersection of tattoos and tech, and it's exciting to see how far this will go.