Some people think the future will include a 3D printer in every home. We think if LEGO started producing these as kits we’d get pretty close. Introducing the home-made LEGO 3D printer… with a chocolate extruder.
[Gosse Adema] has been working on his LEGO based 3D printer for a while now, and it’s gotten pretty good. It’s basically a repackaged Prusa i3, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. It uses real NEMA 17 steppers mounted with LEGO Technic — the Mindstorms motors just don’t quite cut it… not yet anyway.
During his build, a colleague pointed out that back in 2005 Instructables had a remix contest, which included a 3D printer made out of LEGO. The original hacker, [Saul], issued a challenge at the end of his Instructable hoping someone else would build a better chocolate LEGO 3D printer… Well it’s only been 10 years, but [Gosse] did it!
[Thanks Roald!]
This year, I attended the opening of consumer friendly 3D Printing Studio in SIN, where they only sell 3D printers, which are really working. One of my question was food printing. I ended up in an office space of a company which does 3D printing also with commercial printers. In the showroom I saw a Korean made 3D Printer with a “fridge” function or at least a closed enclosure which makes sense if the outside temperature is +30 and humid. What are the environment requirements having good results with this type of printer (I didn’t look at the details at all), just wondering? And what is the printing time for let’s say 7x7cm object (the one I saw was very slow)? Price range (the one I saw was around 2500EUR)?
Our 3D printer http://www.open-electronics.org/tag/3drag-choco/ is a normal 3D printer (3Drag) modified with a syringe to extrude chocolate. We are using a cooling system to solidify the chocolate.
You can print objects around 20x20x20cm (but the syringe is for 60ml chocolate). The price with 3Drag + choco Extruder + cooling system is around €1000
Congratulations, print chocolate is not absolutely simple, and be able to do this with the Lego pieces is incredible. To our 3D printer (3Drag) we had to combine a cooler system to solidify the chocolate immediately just extruded.
I’m planning to use a peltier elements for cooling and a flexible kapton heater for heating (as described in step 7). Only this extruder will not be made of LEGO.
Great, I recommend it.
You can see the system that we did summarized here https://store.open-electronics.org/index.php?_route_=3DCHOCO (I hope this is helpful). Soon I will make a post dedicated to explaining how it was done.
You might want to search for the term “food safe 3d printing”. Bacterial contamination is a principal concern, as well as chemical residue. There is a reason the FDA regulates plastics that come in contact with food.
cmon let’s not exaggerate shall we? the kid is not planning to sell his chocolate. chocolate is actually very resilient to growing bacteria and mold and he won’t get any plastic poisoning just by eating a dozen of 3D printed chocolates.
It is a LEGO chocolate printer for the god sake, the kid will probably reuse the pieces in another project in a couple of weeks.
PS: Just because it has bacteria and fungus it doesn’t mean they are bad for you. You would go insane if you knew what kinds of cheese we eat here, it has so much bacteria and fungus that it actually turns green! It is banned in the USA despite being readily available pretty much in every supermarket in Europe.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/fda-bans-roquefort-other-french-cheeses-due-bacteria-levels-though-theyre-virtually-301638
It is no wonder that people grow with weak immune systems if they take antibiotics to get over a common flu, only eat vegetables that have been sterilized, only swim in chlorinated water and only drink filtered water!
Great mesh of Legos and other mechanics!