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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.'"

12 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No Fair! by Daverd · · Score: 5, Funny

    They included the coral link in the story. Now what are karma whores suppose to do?

    Complain about the coral link, apparently.

  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. "In other news on Wall Street... by Stick_Fig · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...the price of chocolate has suddenly skyrocketed to $100 a pound due to its newfound usage as printer ink. Lexmark has patented the new chocolate-printing technology, and their lawyers plan to sue Nestlé for patent infringement for selling chocolate that works on its system under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."

    --
    ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
  4. 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...

  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. A sequence of events by iamdrscience · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is what went through my mind during the split second as I read the title.

    "3D Chocolate Printer"
    What the crap? Somebody made 3D printer out of chocolate?

    "3D Chocolate Printer Made from Legos?"
    Made from legos? What? This person made it out of chocolate legos? Insanity. That is so awesome.

    And then a second later I realized what it actually meant and while it's pretty cool, it just couldn't live up to my above first impressions. That said, I'm going to go see about making some chocolate legos.

  7. 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.

  8. Google cache... by llZENll · · Score: 5, Informative

    here

  9. Feeding time by triffidsting · · Score: 5, Funny

    I gather from the recent two stories that the /. editors are hungry - whose turn is it to feed them?

    --
    Non, je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir.
  10. Re:Not 3D by twoshortplanks · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This is just a prototype. The next stage in development is to have mechanism after each 2D print to put down some form of powder that can support printing things not directly on top of the previously printed layer. This is what real 3D printers do. You then shake out or vacuum out the powder once you're done leaving a proper 3d object.

    We were thinking icing sugar.

    Mark (who hasn't really been involved in this apart from talking to James about it over tea every morning)

    --
    -- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.