The Arduino takes this information and uses it to move the motors of the printer, positioning the marker over the correct location of the paper so the user can produce a dot.

This may be our first sand matrix printer, but it’s not our first sand 3D printer. Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which celebrates failure as a learning tool.

Kenneth picked up an old dot matrix printer from a swap meet for only $5–what a steal! He then used a BeagleBone –basically Texas Instruments’s version of an Arduino board, to connect it to ...