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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!
And get sued by Nestle for copying the Baby Ruth :).
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Not sure of that's the right link anymore, but my point is here's the project that's done it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNZFbT8CPJU
Not sure what your link had to do with anything, but it /has/ been done before:
http://www.fabathome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Materials:Chocolate
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!
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
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.
You would have to freeze it in liquid nitrogen so that it wouldn't smoosh all over. That is how you mill rubber and elastomers in general. No I am not kidding, have not personally done it, but I know people. Get the rubber too cold it'll shatter, its an art form to get it cold enough but not too cold. Rubber machines pretty easily with decent surface finish when properly cooled, but it'll be uneven due to uneven cooling, which probably makes chocolate unusable, because it'll meet dimensional spec but probably look horribly uneven. If you had a magic cryostat to perfectly evenly cool the chocolate overnight, instead of bubba pouring liq N2 everywhere, then, maybe... Condensation is a huge PITA when liq N2 machining rubber and its only going to be worse with chocolate. That and no cutting fluid means edge buildup means, again, horrible surface finish. Then, the water rusts the machines, unless you use soluable coolant, which is at best semi-poisonous or at least not on the GRASS list. CNC chocolate is not gonna work.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I see that in Europe that junk would be hard pressed to qualify as "chocolate-like".
You cannot buy American chocolate in Europe because it is literally illegal due to not meeting standards.
European chocolate is "real" chocolate.
American chocolate is brown food coloring, crisco, and corn syrup for sweetness. If its sweet and brown its called "chocolate"
You can buy "real chocolate bars" in the US, its just they're called "gourmet" and cost about $4 per bar instead of the $1 bar of Hershey's Crisco.
(Don't know if you have Crisco in europe, its a generic veg oil that is hydrogenated into a room temp solid lard substitute.)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
not all European chocolate is "real" chocolate... we have some of that crappy vegelate as it is derisively named made here in England, the standards were fought over quite vociferously and in the end it meets them through a "loophole" in the regulations
.
Cadbury's milk chocolate is not a high cocoa content and most Easter Egg chocolate in UK is low solids as well... and as for Hershey's... our Asda supermarkets have been selling it... (their parent company is Walmart after all)... I tried some and found only the plain bars were edible... the milk and white bars were bleuch... the texture in the mouth was disgusting...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Oh great now I have to wear 3D glasses while eating my cake too?