Extruder manipulation: 3D Printing Food and light
The idea to be able to 3D print anything just like the replicators in star trek has always been an inspiration to me.
Here I present three of my 3D printing adventures I call extruder manipulation.
Cake batter Printing
Chocolate Printing
Light painting
During the 2020 Covid lockdown I decided to modify my Ender-3 3D printer to be able to print cake/cookie batter. I knew the main challenge was to build a really good extruder. I started designing and prototyping the extruder that held syringes together
Initial Sketch
Assembly & Testing
The four tubes from the four possible syringes combine into one single head. This was the most time consuming part to design!
In my experiments I only used 1 syringe to extrude a thin cake batter.The head bed of the printer slowly cooked the batter, this can be seen as a change in colour of the extruded batter.
Assembled Setup
Extruder CAD
3D paths on Rhin0
Digital toolpaths to Physical Food
The original 3D printer extruder’s functions are transferred to the external food paste extruder just by adjusting the step size for the stepper motor. This controls the flow rate.
The new print parameters such as nozzle diameter, print speed, beed temperature and resolution are controlled by a grasshopper script (on Rhinoceros 3D)
3D Printing Chocolate
The modified Y-axis that holds the LED
Here are a few more light paintings, the Blue heart, Red wireframe mug and the white flower!
Light Painting
Extruder Design
I started with sketching the design and then converted my ideas to a CAD model, here I was using SketchUP.
Once I was Satisfied with my design, 3D printed the parts. and attached the syringes, tubes, motor, and the screws.
Assembled Extruder with four syringes
Hot Bed Cooking the batter slowly.
In 2022 I modified another 3D printer, this time to print chocolate. For this one I built a heated extruder. The heated Extruder keeps the chocolate molten and ready at 37C. I learned here that the long tube cools the chocolate down quite a bit which causes it to clog. I used a heat gun to keep thing smoothly flowing; this is something to improve on the next iteration.
While I was locked down at home during covid and I was experimenting with modifying my ender 3 3D printer, it occurred to me that I would try tracing the path of an LED attachedto the print head and try to create a hologram.
Twin Pyramids
One the path is programmed using a Rhino-Grasshopper script, the LED paths are traced using a long exposure photograph. TO see different angle, multiple shots are taken, giving it the appearance of a hologram.
