I recently wrote an article [1] about Artaic, a company that uses pick-and-place robots to build massive tile mosaics -- including backlit and QR code mosaics. They put individual tiles (1-inch or half-inch) onto an adhesive backing (12"x12") to ease installation. Swapping out the ceramic or glass tiles for currency would be a cool modification!

[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/08/02/artaic-revolutionizing...

Interesting, a US cent coin is 0.75" in diameter, so .442 sq inches, which means a square foot (144 sq inches) would have not quite 1000 pennies (998 if they were perfectly edge to edge. So $10 sq ft for floor covering. Suggests their kitchen floor is about 32 sq feet :-).

Seems like it would be pretty durable, and if you didn't do the whole 'line them all up so they are looking the same way thing' then could put them in pretty quickly.

Did you take account of the fact that hexagonal circle packing is ~90% dense in calculating the cost per square foot?

Edit: doing the math myself, I get 295 pennies to the square foot (0.906*144/0.4417 = 295). Not sure how you got 998, unless you somehow digit-reversed 144.

Your right I screwed up the math in my head I was holding the .375 squared (about .141) and dividing 144 by that rather than the area. That makes the economics a lot better, as a straight up division its only on the order of $3.25 a square foot and certainly as durable as tile in that regard.

This is amazingly OCD. You have to appreciate the commitment to an concept start to finish like this.

OCD is a medical condition, not an adjective. Not only that, even if it were an adjective it wouldn't make sense to use it that way.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make light of a medical condition. I was using the term in a way I commonly hear it used as slang, but I understand some people may suffer from it and I should be more sensitive.

If the glue/sealing process damages the pennies to the point where they can't be used again, this is illegal.

Only if you try to spend them.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1405/is-it-legal-to...

Nope, In the US it is illegal to deface currency for any reason.

---------------------------------- Title 18 United States Code, Section 331

Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or

Whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened -

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both ----------------------------------

And the StraightDope covers that exact passage, and focuses strongly on the "fraudulently" part.

Please point to the part of the kitchen where the fraud is occurring.

Someone should point this out to the people who make the penny squishing machines for tourists that they had on the San Francisco docks when I visited many moons ago. Does anybody know if they are still there at all?

Sorry to have to ask, but is this appropriate for Hacker News?

in the sense that it is a maker project, i guess.

There is a local bar that has done this for the bar top out of pennies with the name of the establishment spelled out in nickels. It's pretty cool.

Not really relevant but they also have over 100 beers on tap and the ceiling is lined with tap handles.

Sounds like the Flying Saucer - except the one in Addison, TX has the back of the bar decorated with pennies behind plastic. I always thought it looked fantastic, and will be doing that to something if I ever own a house.

This is epsilon from cat pictures. You might disagree, but, for what it's worth, I flagged it.

I don't understand what exactly you mean by that. And why flagged? Please let me know, I want to be good part of the community.

epsilon = some very small number used in mathematical proofs, usually approaching zero.

OP is saying that this is too similar to cat pictures. I think that it is worlds better than cat pictures, but still not relevant to the HN community.

It took me a while to parse that statement as well. My thought on the appropriateness (or not) for HN was that it was a moderately disruptive way to produce what is likely a durable floor finish.

I'm not on a tear to get stuff like this killed, but I worry about how much stuff like it is out there if we let it in. It's getting close to imgur territory.

I had the thought it may not be relevant, but added it anyways. In the future, I'll filter what content I submit better. It's been a long day....

Thanks for the explanation.

Thanks; I went back and tried to remove some of the snippiness from my comment.

Thanks, appreciated and noted.

Use nickels if you require a more modern look: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/nickel-tile-floor-a-seattle-...

A restaurant did this at a cost of $2.50/sq foot a few years ago (they apparently used more spacing): http://www.notcot.com/archives/2009/06/floor-of-pennie.php

Ignoring the time commitment this has got to be cheaper than poor quality laminate and it looks amazing. That said, it would have been pretty cool to just do a quality tile mosaic on the floor considering the writer is a mosaic artist.

It looks nice. But as an avid home restorer/handyman I pity the next owner/contractor that has to rip up that floor.

Unfortunately it still looks like that cheap brown linoleum in your grandparents' kitchen.

Am I alone in imagining the floor having a slight sickly smell to it?

Not with three coats of sealant.

Now he just needs to wait for the economy to collapse, so that he can do matching banknote wallpaper. Or get some of the old billion dollar notes in from Zimbabwe.