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3D Chocolate Printer Made from Legos?

Posted by michael on from the mmmm,-chocolate dept.

enrico_suave writes "Whoot.org (linked via Coral P2P Cache because the poor guy is hosting on a ADSL line) has cool design pics, a now removed video clip, and some interesting details of the process. From one of the plog entries: 'We've developed a print head that will print 5mm 'pixels' of the consumable. It basically acts as a pump. It's a medium sized lego gear (driven by a worm gear attached to the motor) with four axles that repeatedly squeeze and release a pipe attached to a funnel that holds the consumables. a half-rotation of this wheel yields a blob.'"

13 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Not 3D by Oculus+Habent · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not a 3D printer. It only moves on two axes. The chocolate is somewhat thick, but it's still just one layer. A nice design, though.

    --
    That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
  2. Exec Summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the glance over the page I took:

    The printer is made with two controllers, one for each axis of the printer, which communicate via IR. The X axis is the master, and sends commands to the Y axis controller. The Y axis controller is on the print head itself, where (I suppose) the X axis controller is on the case. Standard plotter design, really. The print mechanism is four axles that rotate and squeeze a tube filled with melted chocolate. Black & Green 75% cocoa, if it means anything to anyone. 5mm dots, but that's sufficient to make a decent picture.

    I didn't see any pictures of the device. There were some images of the controller motor setups from Mac Brick CAD, but no real pics. The video was removed from the original site, so it didn't get mirrored.

  3. Also interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Saul Griffith at Mit Media Lab has worked with 3-D lego printers that put down wax and chocolate.
    His master's thesis: http://web.media.mit.edu/~saul/mlmasters/sm_master s.pdf
    is about "Towards Personal Fabricators: Tabletop tools for micron and submicron scale functional rapid prototyping".

    I'm more intested in putting down plaster myself.
    Then you can cast metal in it...

  4. Ooh! by iamdrscience · · Score: 3, Informative

    Looks like a fatal misunderstanding of the Coral P2P cache. Coral only caches the page/file linked through it, not the images, video, etc. on the page. So people going to the page will be able to read what he says about it, but his ADSL connect will still be slammed on all the images (it's slow now... surprisingly not slashdotted yet).

    Also, since Coral doesn't cache links, anybody clicking on his links to look at anything other than the one page linked to by slashdot will further increase the load on his server (or more likely just be disappointed and continue the DoSing of this poor guy's DSL line).

    1. Re:Ooh! by Guspaz · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually it looks like you misunderstand how relative URLs work :p

      Most image URLs on sites are relative, which means they don't store the full URL (IE, "http://foo.com/myimage.png"), but instead only the relative path ("myimage.png" or "./myimage.png").

      The hostname is assumed to be the current host, unless that's overridden in the HTML.

      Unfortunately, the creator of this website made the fatal error of using fully qualified URLs instead of relative URLs for his image files. If he were to realize what was going on, I'd imagine he'd immediately make that change.

      So while you're correct in the context of THIS page, in general the Coral P2P cache will cache most images on most sites.

  5. On P2P linking... by Black.Shuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...it would be nice to see Slashdot using Coral-links *before* an article goes live, instead of "Oh yeah, whoops... We get a lot of visitors, right? Better quickly edit a P2P link in there before someone notices the new arti..."

    Here's a JavaScript Bookmarklet I made to make Coral-linking a cinch:

    javascript:l=document.location.href;if(l=='about:b lank'){l=prompt('Input a URL to Coralise:','');};if(l!=''){if(l.search(/\.nyud\.ne t\:8090/)==-1){document.location.href=l.replace(/\ b\/(\b|$)/,'.nyud.net:8090/');}else{if(confirm('Yo u are already looking at the Coral-cached version of this page.\n\nVisit the Coral web-site instead?')){document.location.href='http://www.scs .cs.nyu.edu/coral/';}else{void(0);}}}else{void(0); }

    Put that in your Favorites or Bookmarks -- make sure it is a single line of text, not those multiple-lines. Then just click it when you want to see a cached-version of the page you are currently looking at. Using it on an already cached page will ask you if you want to visit the Coral web-site.

    1. Re:On P2P linking... by Black.Shuck · · Score: 5, Informative

      Oops... There appear to be a few erroneous spaces in that link. Here are the fixes:

      about:b lank

      Should be...

      about:blank

      And this one...

      /\.nyud\.ne t\:8090/

      Should be.../p>

      /\.nyud\.net\:8090/

      And this one...

      http://www.scs .cs.nyu.edu/coral/

      Should be...

      http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/
    2. Re:On P2P linking... by ashkar · · Score: 5, Informative

      Or if you use firefox, mozilla, etc., Coral has a context menu extension that you can install here.

  6. Plural.. by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 4, Informative

    The plural of "Lego" is, and has always been, "Lego"

    Thank you, and goodnight.

    --
    Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
  7. Google cache... by llZENll · · Score: 5, Informative

    here

  8. More Pictures of The Printer by twoshortplanks · · Score: 4, Informative

    These are some development pictures I took of the print head testing. Note at this stage James, Nicholas and Leon were playing with the consistancy of the chocolate and managed to print something that didn't totally look unlike something much more worrying.

    --
    -- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
  9. It's Lego! by Goth+Biker+Babe · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not Legos. It's like sheep. I have one sheep. You have one sheep. We have many sheep. This field is full of sheep. The printer is made of Lego!

  10. Actually... by MikeSweetser · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...it's "LEGO bricks" or "LEGO pieces". Not Lego, or Legos, or even LEGO. LEGO pieces/bricks, to review to the company (which should always be capitalized) and the actual objects themselves. This is straight from LEGO (who really wants it as "LEGO® bricks" but you can't have everything :))

    Mike