Frostbot: CNC cookie frosting

posted Dec 30th 2007 8:29pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: cnc hacks, misc hacks, tool hacks

[Brian Schmalz] sent in his Frostbot. It’s a fun CNC bot project that he built to frost cookies for his latest holiday party. He (wussed out a bit) and started with a kit based CNC machine, but he made up for it by driving it with his own control hardware (that sparkfun happens to have for sale). His USB bit wacker interface certainly looks interesting – I might consider adding it in front of the stepper controllers on my cnc mill. Especially interesting is the HPGL interpreter software that converts graphics to stepper commands via the bit whacker interface.

Read

Comments [10]

Reader Comments

I wonder if anyones tried using 3 primary colors of frosting and a mixing dispenser to make a full color decorator…

Posted at 11:01 pm on Dec 30th, 2007 by Wolf

You would have to flush the old color of frosting out of the dispenser every time you changed colors.
I think it would be easier (and less wasteful) to just color-separate the image and then print each resulting halftone screen onto the cookie in cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Posted at 11:32 pm on Dec 30th, 2007 by erik

it might be useful to enable the bot to ice a cookie moving at a slow speed on a coveyor belt or offsets on a cookie sheet

Posted at 12:26 am on Dec 31st, 2007 by cartufer

You could set it up so that you had it decorate multiple cookies by creating designs over the same image you want to create, and placing cookies in said locations.

Posted at 12:46 am on Dec 31st, 2007 by Sean

oh boy… now I want a CNC machine.

Posted at 8:23 am on Dec 31st, 2007 by Skyler Orlando

Cool. CNC in the kitchen. I never knew I could possibly get my mother into this hobby.

Great idea!

Ivan Irons
http://www.cncinformation.com

Posted at 9:53 am on Dec 31st, 2007 by Ivan Irons

Check out my frostbot/3d printer that extrudes frosting.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-Polar-3-D-Printer

I built mine out of Legos and I used a Polar, instead of a cartesian, control scheme.

And I am still working out the control software

Posted at 11:14 am on Dec 31st, 2007 by Gene Hacker

got milk?

Posted at 8:08 pm on Dec 31st, 2007 by strider_mt2k

You should use an screw type extruder for the icing to flow properly try to find an playdough type an design your own interface and tips and you will get much better results,also please get this machine FDA approved and you can sell it to bakeries. WCH

Posted at 8:02 pm on Apr 4th, 2009 by walter hynson

CNC is really cool!
I wonder if it could be adapted to do designs on cupcakes as they are all the rage / fashion at the moment.
A great addition to the cake decorating world.

cake decorator

Posted at 1:32 pm on Jun 22nd, 2009 by cake decorator