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3D Chocolate Printer Made from Legos?
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.'"
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
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.
Saul Griffith at Mit Media Lab has worked with 3-D lego printers that put down wax and chocolate.r s.pdf
His master's thesis: http://web.media.mit.edu/~saul/mlmasters/sm_maste
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...
...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:
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.
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.
The plural of "Lego" is, and has always been, "Lego"
Thank you, and goodnight.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
here
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.
...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