If you have some random bits of wood floating around that you just don't know what to do with, perhaps you could take a leaf out of Lucien Langton's book. The 25-year-old student at the Lausanne University of Art and Design (ECAL) in France has built a functioning printer for wood that uses fire as a medium.
FireWriter consists of a repurposed inkjet printer controlled with Arduino Uno, a calibration module equipped with an optical sensor and fitted with a Dremel torch loaded with a mixture of butane and propane that burns at up to 1200 degrees Celsius.
A black-and-white image has to be fed into Processing software; it then creates a Wiring script that's fed back to the Arduino unit.
"FireWriter is a machine using contemporary rapid prototyping electronics combined with humanity's first technology: fire." Langton says of his project. "The purpose is to propose a dialogue between image reproduction and its destruction. Inevitably, alterations of the support are linked with alteration of aesthetics. The result offers aspects of engraving with a mechanical/pixelized pattern."
The FireWriter operates on the same principle as the old dot-matrix printers, laying out an image dot by dot, line by line. However, it does need a bit of manual guidance, with a human controller guiding the printer down each line, resulting in some pretty wobbly-looking images. Still, it's a pretty interesting method of pyrography, although it's ironic to note that the more technologically advanced method ends up looking more primitive.
We don't think it's quite ready to catch on.