While inspecting some jello shots for a friend’s upcoming 25th birthday, [Sprite_tm] had an epiphany. What if you could print designs inside the jello shots? He quickly grabbed a syringe and proceeded to inject food dye into one of the jello shots — it worked. Unfortunately, his friend pointed out that it would take far too long to do each jello shot by hand, to which [Sprite] responded:
Never mind that, I’ll just whip up a 3D printer that can make nice figures in the jelly for you.
Classic. The great thing about the hacker-mindset is that you never say no when confronted with a problem!
To achieve this printer, [Sprite_tm] has taken a handful of old CD-ROM drives to create a three axis moving platform. He’s using a forth drive’s ejector assembly to depress a syringe which pushes a concoction of banana liquor, green food colouring and cornstarch through medical tubing to the ink-head. To control it, he’s just using an ATTiny2313 with a mere 2K of memory. It took a bit of fiddling with to find the right flow, but works surprisingly well. Stick around after the break to see its printing capabilities.
