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3D Chocolate Printer
BoxRec writes "Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer that prints layers of chocolate instead of ink or plastic. 'Now we have an opportunity to combine chocolate with digital technology, including the design, digital manufacturing and social networking. Chocolate has a lot of social purpose, so our intention is to develop a community and share the designs, ideas and experience about it,' says lead scientist Dr Liang Hao."
now I have to hide this from the fiancee!
SWEET!
Been done before. http://shopriffraff.blogspot.com/
And get sued by Nestle for copying the Baby Ruth :).
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Can't wait til we get this here in the States, because if there's one thing we need in this country, it's more chocolate products...
...before someone thought to use something other than plastic pellets in their RepRap.....
Free Pie! The Pie is Also Evil!
So... they made a Frostruder... which you can buy here: http://store.makerbot.com/toolheads/makerbot-frostruder.html
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
I once added on a hot summer day 100 g of chocolate to my keyboard. bad idea...
I recall hearing about a chocolate extruder for http://store.makerbot.com/ Thing-O-Matic
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Wouldn't it be simpler to make a chocolate CNC? That way you can make a bunch of squares in the background and just feed them into the fairly quick milling part of the machine. Fewer tubes to clean anyways.
Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer
The important part is England. Here in the states this is REALLY old stuff. My mother in law worked at a small bakery in the middle of nowhere a decade ago which had similar machines, that not only squirted chocolate and chocolate frosting, but pretty much all colors of the frosting rainbow. The idea is kids birthday cakes with a licensed TV character made out of chocolate pieces and/or frosting. They also made cool frosting flowers etc on an industrial mass produced scale. Now that I think back, there were three machines, a frosting robot that was vaguely ink-jet-ish in operation including a (then new) windows 95 printer driver and had a huge bed (like sheetcake size), a flower robot which ran under a dos menu system with what a machinist would call a small rotary table, and the chocolate lace robot, don't remember its software, that appears to be what ye limeys have finally reproduced. It was customizable, I believe she once mentioned she could print chocolate lace for wedding cakes with the bride's name knitted into the lace, etc. There was another technology that printed colored sugars, essentially edible cotton candy, that could be applied to cakes for 2-D pictures, almost exactly like laser printer toner is ironed on to etchable PCBs. I have no idea if grannie's bakery was considered leading or trailing edge. Grannie was not exactly a computer scientist, but she none the less used the tools quite effectively.
I haven't talked to her about this stuff in about a decade... Who knows what state of the art in technological cake decoration is like now, probably octopus-like robots with a hundred arms or maybe lasers to carmelize? Maybe realtime taste/smell synthesis while printing, so you can make the frosting rum bottle taste like rum and a frosting whiskey bottle taste like whiskey?
I guess in England it takes scientists with PHDs to re-implement what little old ladies did in the USA decades ago? Next up, English scientists learn how to cook tasty food just like grannie? Or learn to knit?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
As others have noted, this isn't a first. I also noticed that the picture on the BBC site is spelling chocolate as chocalate. Oops.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I think you need to pull your head out of your ass.
I bet her machine didn't do 3D frosting (as in create layers of frosting), which is what's news here. Also, her machine did frosting - not hardened chocolate - which is a whole other challenge.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it has been done before, just not by your grandma.
Are you sure the really important part is not perhaps "3D"?
I've seen cakes with all kinds of images printed on them, but all in 2D. They were basically just photographs printed with colored sweet stuff. All 3D things like a wedding couple that you find on a wedding cake were pre-made in factories and placed on top.
-- I'm waiting for a 3D beer printer. Oh, wait, it's called a beer tap.
USA! USA! USA! Nobody can compare! USA!
Seriously though, a 2D specialised printer hardly compares to a 3D printer. Or are you going to tell me your 2D Inkjet is a match far a 3D printer? Or that CNC can compare to most 3D printing techniques as far as complexity of the resulting model in concerned? Yea ... thought so.
You should go to the BBC and actually read the article, it's a 3-D printer that uses chocolate not a 2-D one using food dye.
Now if someone could make one of these that used butter they could totally own at state fairs across the country!
rain. I'd have chocolate rain! BOOYAA!
Where does the signature go?
You can already buy that:
http://www.poopgift.com/
Yeah but that was using American Chocolate. Not real chocolate.
n/t
to be honest we got bored inventing the TV, Telephone, WWW and the computer, i'd be pretty sure your Grannie's chocolate printer was copied from a similar device we had in Victorian London, saying that as we have the best University in the World, i.e Cambridge, (beats Harvard, Princeton) then i shudder to think what your PHD's are doing if ours are making chocolate
Now my wife finally has a compelling example of the usefulness of /. articles. What could improve her life more than a 3D chocolate printer?
This is all about accurate 3D printing not 2D patterns /lace that happen to have a certain thickness. This is the FIRST alm machine that uses chocolate properly in 3D building the model up layer by layer with specific controls on the heating and cooling of the chocolate so that it doesn't taste like crap like most machines.
Frosting ALM is easy because you don't need to worry about damaging the consistency like chocolate.
OK.. we've had 3d prototyping printers for a while, changing the medium you're prototyping with isn't 'OMG NEWS!' it's 'oh hai, we twiddled some bits and adjusted
some temps.. now it can do chocolate too instead of resin!'
I mean.. MakerBot has been around for 2 years already, and I have demos of industrial Rapid Prototyping machines (a handy working spanner wrench!) for over a decade.
Am I the only person that says 'OK we made 3d printers.. so now we can print almost anything form 3D so long as someone engineers the misc bits'.. want to print outa Steel? can't see why you couldn't, although there are some various engineering feats that need to be worked out, but no reason you couldn't. (and I don't think it'd be as strong as die-cast?).. basic tech adaption shouldn't be the realm of PhDs.. either someone is bored, overeducated, or is just hogging the claim.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Oh great now I have to wear 3D glasses while eating my cake too?
Wouldn't it be sort of hard for a physical object, frosting in this case, to exist in anything less than 3 dimensions? Pretty sure even a thin amount of chocolate frosting would have 3 dimensions.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I could understand the possibility of a commercial company researching this.... because it has potential commercial applications. However, this was done at a university -- an institution of education. How did convince people to give them money to research this? Am I missing something?
how about a box of obscenely shaped chocolates?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Note the hyphen. A "chocolate printer" would be a printer made out of chocolate. And that would be news, not this.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
What I want is a Chocolate Printer that would allow me to "print" any chocolate bar in its database - especially including the ones I grew up with that simply aren't available any longer. Of course it would need cartridges holding other than chocolate for the process.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That would certainly be newsworthy.
Chocolate has a lot of social purpose
Things only a scientist would say for $500, Alex.
This guy didn't nearly the amount of press but here's the article from 2009. I've seen on print chocolate at a convention / maker faire before too but I don't know who owned it.
http://builders.reprap.org/2009/03/chocolate-extruder.html
It would be interesting if they really did reinvent the wheel instead of copying everything that already exists though. Hopefully they will publish their plans.
I bet her machine didn't do 3D frosting (as in create layers of frosting), which is what's news here. Also, her machine did frosting - not hardened chocolate - which is a whole other challenge.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it has been done before, just not by your grandma.
It did 3d layers. In general, "the cake is a lie", but not this time. Also I mentioned, they had a large sheetcake printer, but they also had a very 3-d robotic flower maker, which couldn't make anything bigger than, say, a drink coaster, as far as I know all it did was make different flower species, but what amazing little flowers it could make... She could mix her flower frosting color to appropriately match the bridesmaid dresses and the robot made flowers that matched the real world floral arrangements, very cool. 3-D frosting printing was common in the 90s, or at least grannie's employer was not amazingly noteworthy, they were just yet another bakery that happened to decorate cakes for weddings and other occasions, nothing terribly unusual or specially marketed. You'd have to ask a real foodie or a chef how popular that robotic stuff was/is, grannie is the only pastry chef I personally know...
And one thing I mentioned in my post was their chocolate lace printer, which is exactly what you claim is "new". I am no cake decorator, but apparently you refrigerate that stuff after it prints, peel it off, and smoosh it into the wedding cake frosting. The point of printing it is about 50% of it doesn't make it in one piece to the cake, you recycle the broken bits, and they had a way to print the brides name or whatever into the lace as it was printed. Also the computer had about one zillion lace designs on disk and at some expense custom lace was possible. Lets say she did 2 fancy cakes per day, that means you need 4 cakes worth of lace in stock due to losses, but there's 100 lace styles, so now you've got to organize 400 sheets in the fridge, if the bride is willing to go "off the rack" as opposed to demanding the chocolate lace match the lace on her dress, and if you can restock more or less daily. Hmm I'm thinking chocolate lace either has to be done by hand (which is very time consuming = expensive) or has to be done by robot, which is how grannies bakery did in the 90s.
The bakery went out of business a couple years after grannie retired; maybe they blew too much money on robot frosting machines, in a world full of $1/day Chinese factories and $20/day illegals. Or maybe it was some other problem.
I googled several terms for robotic frosting equipment, and found absolutely nothing. This has got to be one of those situations where none of us know the French or Italian or Japanese noun to google for. Computery thingies that eat frosting and excrete frosting flowers are/were out there, somewhere, and they're not even remotely new. If only we knew what to google for, there's probably a whole economic ecosystem of these machines. Probably from the same people that make restaurant-grade appliances?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
After building the printer, they fired up their 3D modelling software, loaded the first demo file they found and proceeded to print out a chocolate teapot.
Perhaps they should have taken the hint?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I thought it was called a mold?
This was an undergraduate project started in my final year at Exeter.
For an undergrad project I thought it was pretty impressive; an ALM machine made from scratch (including control system, and chocolate melting facilities) in a year by a few undergrads. Chocolate is not an easy material to work with. I forget what few details I knew, but basically getting layers of molten chocolate to join together and be in the correct polymorph is not easy. (hence the addition of what appear to be heating or cooling nozzles in the image in the article).
Liang Hao was the project supervisor then, and I assume he's the supervisor now. I don't think this is his main area of research!
Not sure why it's popped up in the media now; it's certainly not news (although the BBC has recently covered (badly IMHO) some other ALM stuff).
Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer
The important part is England. Here in the states this is REALLY old stuff. My mother in law worked at a small bakery in the middle of nowhere a decade ago which had similar machines, that not only squirted chocolate and chocolate frosting, but pretty much all colors of the frosting rainbow. The idea is kids birthday cakes with a licensed TV character made out of chocolate pieces and/or frosting. They also made cool frosting flowers etc on an industrial mass produced scale. Now that I think back, there were three machines, a frosting robot that was vaguely ink-jet-ish in operation including a (then new) windows 95 printer driver and had a huge bed (like sheetcake size), a flower robot which ran under a dos menu system with what a machinist would call a small rotary table, and the chocolate lace robot, don't remember its software, that appears to be what ye limeys have finally reproduced. It was customizable, I believe she once mentioned she could print chocolate lace for wedding cakes with the bride's name knitted into the lace, etc. There was another technology that printed colored sugars, essentially edible cotton candy, that could be applied to cakes for 2-D pictures, almost exactly like laser printer toner is ironed on to etchable PCBs. I have no idea if grannie's bakery was considered leading or trailing edge. Grannie was not exactly a computer scientist, but she none the less used the tools quite effectively.
I haven't talked to her about this stuff in about a decade... Who knows what state of the art in technological cake decoration is like now, probably octopus-like robots with a hundred arms or maybe lasers to carmelize? Maybe realtime taste/smell synthesis while printing, so you can make the frosting rum bottle taste like rum and a frosting whiskey bottle taste like whiskey?
I guess in England it takes scientists with PHDs to re-implement what little old ladies did in the USA decades ago? Next up, English scientists learn how to cook tasty food just like grannie? Or learn to knit?
Turns out, this was next:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/07/1735203/Spanish-Surgeon-Performs-First-Synthetic-Organ-Transplant?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29
Chocolate Aperture Science Companion Cube... "You ate your companion cube faster than any other test subject on record."