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.'"

Not 3D

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.

Exec Summary

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.

Re:Not 3D

The 3D plastic printer we have at work (granted it's a cheep one)

Can you really say that about any 3d printer? It's like saying, "Yes I drive a Ferrari, but it's one of the cheap ones...." hehe

Re:Not 3D

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)

whoot! smoke that server!

will as slashdotting be something that makes james go whoot?

Woah

Wow... Very cool. Awesome. Man, I thought I was cool when I made a merry-go-round. sheesh, shows offs...

No Fair!

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

Re:No Fair!

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

Complain about the coral link, apparently.

dammit

Nice cache. This whole thing is absolutely pointless without the website.

Request...

Edit > Find in this Page

"Mirror" > Next.

"The Text you entered was not found."

Please change above. ..Wait! I just did >.

Sorry! (^_^)

"In other news on Wall Street...

...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."

Not far off

You know that really don't seem that far off. Not with confections maybe but it's almost gotten this bad. You should all move to Canada. Or vote. Damnit you Americans need to take a stand against your corrupt politicians. Write more letters, not emails.

Re:Not far off

Actually, lately, I've been considering exercising a different freedom: The right to bare arms.

They're so damned white, they'll blind our politicians stupid.

Not that we'd notice a difference.

Re:"In other news on Wall Street...

I think you mean "Digital Millennium Candy Act"?

Re:"In other news on Wall Street...

At last we can share physical things, like we do with music now... MY PORSCHE, IT'S MELTING!!!

Also interesting

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 [mit.edu]
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...

editors on drug?

how could a story like this one get onto /. front page, it's nothing more a 2 axis lego printer with a an exaggerated name (there is one on the back of lego mindstorm invention retail box, and you can build one from the step by step instruction that comes with ULTIMATE BUILDERS SET (3800)) yeah, it can squeeze chocolate, but it's not like we have girlfriends anyway.

Ooh!

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).

Re:Ooh!

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.

On P2P linking...

...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.

Re:On P2P linking...

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/

Re:On P2P linking...

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

mirror

hey, just use the ultimate mirror: google. http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Awhoot.org+l ego&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8 I found the articles and pics. Sweet. (I would throw it on my own server, but not ready for getting slashdotted myself).

A sequence of events

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.

"Transparent" Coral caching my butt...

Opera doesn't like it. It tries to download rather than just render.

What's with all the food articles?

I guess _someone_ at Slashdot is pretty hungry...

Shit.

Just when you think you've gotten used to the zany Slashdot titles, you get '3d Chocolate Printer Made From Legos'. We're officially on another dimension now.

Plural..

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

Thank you, and goodnight.

Nice try

What's this about a motor??

Nice try, but everyone knows that Real Men only
program printers in Pure Lego.

Google cache...

here [google.com]

Feeding time

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

I'm sorry

But that is the best headline ever.

-Spexx

The only important question is...

... does the printer support proportional rendering of chocolate superscripts in Times New Roman?

Gillette Business Model

Great... You just know that Hershey's is going to charge an arm and a leg for a refill cartridge!

Plog?

Plog? What the hell is that?

More Pictures of The Printer

These are some development pictures [twoshortplanks.com] 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.

It's Lego!

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!

Re:It's Lego!

And the 3d printing team have lots of lego sheep [2shortplanks.com].

(I can't believe someone had to say "stop spending all your time building sheep and get back to making a 3d printer" to them)

Actually...

...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

Plurality

This one's always confused me. Here in the UK, 'Lego' has always been a mass noun; the individual bits of plastic are known as 'Lego bricks' or 'bits of Lego'.

And yet I keep reading the word 'Legos', which makes no sense here. Is the term officially different in the US, or have you merkins been getting it wrong all the time (unthinkable!)?

Maybe they should make it a laser...

... I really want to see the user's face when he prints something, and sees the whole printer turn into a hot steaming pile of stuff =)

Then imagine getting a support call like "URGH! MY PRINTER TURNED INTO JUICE!!!", it is something that won't happen everyday!

I told you so...

The dog really did eat my homework!

Moneymaker!

I can see potential with this invention. Take the basic idea then utilize it to decorate cakes and confections with. Print your loved one's face on a triple-layer chocolate cake for their birthday and watch as their jaws hit the floor with astonishment. I can see dollar signs perking already!

If the output bugs you....

This is the best way to be a frog...If the output bugs you, just eat it! Also, it beats a shredder for disposing of the output.

LEGO operating systems already exist...

...and can be conveniently used:

• brickOS [sourceforge.net],
• LegOS [www.noga.de],
• and Java-based one [tml.hut.fi].

Re:plog: wtf?

Plog [inc.com]

What's the matter, having problems with google?

Re:Please, it's not 'Legos'

Yeah you're right but you are fighting a losing battle (or should that be 'loosing'?). Look what they did to 'couldn't care less'.