3D Chocolate Printer Made from Legos? 165
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Exec Summary (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Also interesting (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:dammit (Score:3, Informative)
editors on drug? (Score:2, Informative)
Ooh! (Score:4, Informative)
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).
On P2P linking... (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:
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.
mirror (Score:1, Informative)
Re:On P2P linking... (Score:5, Informative)
Oops... There appear to be a few erroneous spaces in that link. Here are the fixes:
Should be...
And this one...
Should be.../p>
And this one...
Should be...
Re:Ooh! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:On P2P linking... (Score:2, Informative)
Screw it, it's all messed up.
I made a page which has the link on it:
Coral P2P Bookmarklet [nyud.net]
Coral-linked, of course. ;)
Re:On P2P linking... (Score:5, Informative)
Plural.. (Score:4, Informative)
Thank you, and goodnight.
Google cache... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not 3D (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe he's going to add this next. Maybe he already has it. I didn't want to joing the sheep in vaporizing his ADSL line.
eric
Re:Great excuse for school (Score:1, Informative)
"The lethal dosage of theobromine in dogs is between 250 and 500 mgs/kg, or about 2/3 to 1 1/3 of baking chocolate for every 2.2 pounds of body weight. However, serious non-fatal poisonings have been reported in dogs after eating smaller amounts.
At our practice, a 20-pound dachshund showed serious signs of poisoning after eating 3/4 of a pound of milk chocolate and another 22-pound dog died after eating two pounds of baking chocolate."
source:
http://www.apogeecomgrp.com/drkevin/chocolate.htm
Re:"In other news on Wall Street... (Score:2, Informative)
and all most of you do is bitch about how much lexmark sucks for protecting their revenue stream, while HP is giving it to you and you smile and walk away, blissfully unaware.
More Pictures of The Printer (Score:5, Informative)
It's Lego! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More Pictures of The Printer (Score:2, Informative)
Actually... (Score:4, Informative)
Mike
LEGO operating systems already exist... (Score:2, Informative)
Green & Blacks (Score:3, Informative)
I'm guessing that it means Green and Blacks [greenandblacks.com] chocolate. G&B make some of the best organic chocolate around in my opinion. I wonder however if they did extensive scientific testing before they settled on the relatively high cocoa content 75% stuff. I think I should apply for research funding to look into this in more detail
Plurality (Score:2, Informative)
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!)?
Re:Actually... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not 3D (Score:2, Informative)
Technically, it's an FDM machine. Fused Deposition Molding.
I believe you just dump an IGES file to it....then maybe sometime next year, you'll get your part.
If you saw how cheap looking and feeling the resultant product is and (as I've already implied) how utterly painfully slow it is then you'd understand why it is cheep.
We've had it for like 3 years and it was the cheep model then.
These things have been around for quite a while.
eric