3D Chocolate Printer 91
BoxRec writes "Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer that prints layers of chocolate instead of ink or plastic. 'Now we have an opportunity to combine chocolate with digital technology, including the design, digital manufacturing and social networking. Chocolate has a lot of social purpose, so our intention is to develop a community and share the designs, ideas and experience about it,' says lead scientist Dr Liang Hao."
Oh great (Score:3)
now I have to hide this from the fiancee!
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GP doesn't want the fiancee to plump up while playing with the high tech gadget.
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tagged mmmchocolateomnomnom :-)
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You can already buy that:
http://www.poopgift.com/ [poopgift.com]
From the archive of Bloom County... (Score:2)
how about a box of obscenely shaped chocolates?
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One of my sisters borrowed the other sister's car for moving female sex goods to a site where she was having a sales party one evening.
Next morning, the other sister was taking her children to school, and didn't notice that they'd found a box of "ice breaker" chocolate penises in the back seat.
The children took the box of chocolates into school and shared them around their friends at break.
One of the teachers was given a chocolate by one of the children.
"Fu
Too Late (Score:1)
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Saw this yesterday in an attempt to see it actually working.
Was disappointed.
Why would you have a whole report without it actually printing any chocolate?
cynical reasons I can think of :
1) It's something they're working on, doesn't work yet but they want to raise publicity/funding
2) They ate all the chocolate so couldn't print anymore
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Indeed, my cousin works w/ Fab@Home and one of my friends in college worked on 3D chocolate printing similar to this a few years before that as a grad project. Nothing new here.
Can't wait... (Score:1)
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in the States, because if there's one thing we need in this country, it's more chocolate products
Yes you do, the last time I was there, chocolate one takes at random from the shelf is completely unedible. The brand I've seen to be most popular, "Hershey", is the worst of it all. And looking at the ingredients, I see that in Europe that junk would be hard pressed to qualify as "chocolate-like".
I guess that you might have real chocolate somewhere in an obscure stand in a corner, like that mythical "drinkable American beer" people keep mentioning here on Slashdot -- my sampling was just a few random pie
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I see that in Europe that junk would be hard pressed to qualify as "chocolate-like".
You cannot buy American chocolate in Europe because it is literally illegal due to not meeting standards.
European chocolate is "real" chocolate.
American chocolate is brown food coloring, crisco, and corn syrup for sweetness. If its sweet and brown its called "chocolate"
You can buy "real chocolate bars" in the US, its just they're called "gourmet" and cost about $4 per bar instead of the $1 bar of Hershey's Crisco.
(Don't know if you have Crisco in europe, its a generic veg oil that is hydrogenated into a ro
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If its sweet and brown its called "chocolate"
No; if it's sweet and brown, it's called Kelly Rowland. If it's sweet and brown and edible it's called chocolate.
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Well *I* would eat her out any day.
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not all European chocolate is "real" chocolate... we have some of that crappy vegelate as it is derisively named made here in England, the standards were fought over quite vociferously and in the end it meets them through a "loophole" in the regulations [europa.eu]
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In the USA for some reason people seem to be unable to taste something if it doesn't have loads of sugar and salt added, or the combination of both.
Real chocolate has a bitter taste, not a sweet taste. I can appreciate it, but an American would not want to eat it, he would want loads of sugar added to it and the bitter cocoa removed, so that what remains is just the same as any other american food is (a bunch of sugar with color added to it).
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This ^
I can go into any reasonably decent grocery here, or even many WalMarts and buy good chocolate. 85% or more cacao. Even many "eurotrash" brands. I appreciate GOOD chocolate, and also dont care for Hershey's or most "milk" chocolates (including most european ones). Hershey's special extra dark is actually pretty decent. Just like beer. There are MANY great made in USA beers. Thousands of great micro-brews that I'd put against anything from Europe. GP is being especially short sighted and lame. This wou
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I know, I was exaggerating. I'm actually happy to hear about the many micro-brews that exist there too. Didn't know that. I just based my post on the image we get here of what comes from there, local stuff from there doesn't reach us here of course. And on the story I heard from someone from here making a cake of a type I love, for kids in America and they hated the cake because it wasn't sweet enough while kids here would love it. Anyway, thanks for your post :)
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I can appreciate it, but an American would not want to eat it
Real chocolate, like what, 85% cocoa? I love it. I don't care for the taste, but the drug-induced euphoria is lovely.
How strong is your chocolate?
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In the US, "real" chocolate is usually called dark chocolate, while milk chocolate is the more common mild sweet stuff for kids.
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In the USA for some reason people seem to be unable to taste something if it doesn't have loads of sugar and salt added, or the combination of both.
Nonsense I say! .......Sometimes they smother it in cheese too. Or, I should say, a yellow cheese like substance.
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I admit that some of best things I ever ate were during my two trips to the US. You have wonderful pizza (far better than "real" pizza in Italy!), great tex-mex and so on.
But where it comes to bread, beer, chocolate... it's a disaster. I know you can find any food for any taste somewhere, but if every sample taken from what is in plain sight is not edible, something is wrong with the majority of people there. Shops wouldn't stock nearly exclusively the trash if no one bought it. Thus, I think it's a saf
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Ahh, German bread and German beer! A meal in itself. With sausage and cheese . . . extravagant!
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You really just have to look. "Go where the locals go" doesn't always work either - depending on who the locals are. For example, I've had some of the WORST BBQ I've ever had (by any measure I can surmise) in Memphis and Texas, both the BBQ capitals of the universe. By following the "locals". I managed to find MUCH better by simply going a few other places and not judging based on a small sample size. Ditto that for Beer, Pizza and many other foods, attractions, etc. Sometimes you just have to look around
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Anything you call "pizza" isn't pizza if it doesn't seem *and* taste like italian pizza (I'd go further and say Neapolitan Pizza). Fullstop!
Now, I also like PizzaHut and stuff, but I just consider it what it is: something made with spongy bread, sauce, some weird cheese, and a lot of other stuff on it.
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But where it comes to bread, beer, chocolate... it's a disaster
And for some reason, meats; I mean, prepared meats, like sausages, salami, ham, and so on. The selection and quality are incredibly poor compared to Europe (especially Central and Eastern Europe, though you can get some pretty good stuff in France and Italy too). It's not so bad for cheeses, but finding a good prosciutto or smoked sausage is very expensive and a real pain.
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Yeah, we've got swill like Bud Light. I'm sorry (I really am, honestly.) But we've also got Three Floyd's stout selection and Dogfish Head IPAs.
But to counter that, you've tried to match us in the suckfest that is mainstream beers by putting Champ next to the likes of Chimay or Denison's hefeweizen.
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Most American chocolate contains some soured milk, which includes butyric acid, also found in vomit. There's nothing wrong with that*, but it's certainly not a taste or smell I'd be expecting in chocolate. At work, whenever someone visits a foreign country they bring back a sweet snack food (biscuits, sweets, chocolates). Usually they don't last more than a week, but American chocolate typically gets thrown out after a couple of months. It's presumably an acquired taste.
* Soured milk in chocolate is nothi
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Hey, don't be so uppity about the shitty beer we have over here.
YOU have Strongbow and Buckfast, so that makes us even.
And the way home brewing is really getting into swing in these parts, we'll be having proper pubs serving genuine, room-temperature ales, lagers, stouts, porters and more.
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The first thing Europeans tried with cocoa was smoking it. Guess that didn't work out.
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Yes yes, America's Low End Mass produced consumer product is of lower quality the Europe's Mid/Upper range quality products. Everything is better in Europe even the tear gas launched at protesters because your government cannot afford your raise.
It was only a matter of time (Score:2)
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Up next, printing with water [reprap.org]!
MakerBot Frostruder (Score:5, Informative)
Bill
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If you can make a real chocolate 3D image with *that* I would be very amazed. Temperature control is everything if you are talking chocolate. I don't see very advanced 3D chocolate letters coming anytime soon.
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Whoops, that would be "advanced 3D chocolate PASTE" letters.
combine chocolate with digital technology? (Score:2)
I once added on a hot summer day 100 g of chocolate to my keyboard. bad idea...
Thing-O-Matic has this right? (Score:2)
I recall hearing about a chocolate extruder for http://store.makerbot.com/ [makerbot.com] Thing-O-Matic
Easier and faster? (Score:1)
Wouldn't it be simpler to make a chocolate CNC? That way you can make a bunch of squares in the background and just feed them into the fairly quick milling part of the machine. Fewer tubes to clean anyways.
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Wouldn't it be simpler to make a chocolate CNC? That way you can make a bunch of squares in the background and just feed them into the fairly quick milling part of the machine. Fewer tubes to clean anyways.
You would have to freeze it in liquid nitrogen so that it wouldn't smoosh all over. That is how you mill rubber and elastomers in general. No I am not kidding, have not personally done it, but I know people. Get the rubber too cold it'll shatter, its an art form to get it cold enough but not too cold. Rubber machines pretty easily with decent surface finish when properly cooled, but it'll be uneven due to uneven cooling, which probably makes chocolate unusable, because it'll meet dimensional spec but pr
CNC frosting / fudge / etc is old stuff in the USA (Score:5, Funny)
Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer
The important part is England. Here in the states this is REALLY old stuff. My mother in law worked at a small bakery in the middle of nowhere a decade ago which had similar machines, that not only squirted chocolate and chocolate frosting, but pretty much all colors of the frosting rainbow. The idea is kids birthday cakes with a licensed TV character made out of chocolate pieces and/or frosting. They also made cool frosting flowers etc on an industrial mass produced scale. Now that I think back, there were three machines, a frosting robot that was vaguely ink-jet-ish in operation including a (then new) windows 95 printer driver and had a huge bed (like sheetcake size), a flower robot which ran under a dos menu system with what a machinist would call a small rotary table, and the chocolate lace robot, don't remember its software, that appears to be what ye limeys have finally reproduced. It was customizable, I believe she once mentioned she could print chocolate lace for wedding cakes with the bride's name knitted into the lace, etc. There was another technology that printed colored sugars, essentially edible cotton candy, that could be applied to cakes for 2-D pictures, almost exactly like laser printer toner is ironed on to etchable PCBs. I have no idea if grannie's bakery was considered leading or trailing edge. Grannie was not exactly a computer scientist, but she none the less used the tools quite effectively.
I haven't talked to her about this stuff in about a decade... Who knows what state of the art in technological cake decoration is like now, probably octopus-like robots with a hundred arms or maybe lasers to carmelize? Maybe realtime taste/smell synthesis while printing, so you can make the frosting rum bottle taste like rum and a frosting whiskey bottle taste like whiskey?
I guess in England it takes scientists with PHDs to re-implement what little old ladies did in the USA decades ago? Next up, English scientists learn how to cook tasty food just like grannie? Or learn to knit?
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Of course, as others have pointed out, it has been done before, just not by your grandma.
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I bet her machine didn't do 3D frosting (as in create layers of frosting), which is what's news here. Also, her machine did frosting - not hardened chocolate - which is a whole other challenge.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it has been done before, just not by your grandma.
It did 3d layers. In general, "the cake is a lie", but not this time. Also I mentioned, they had a large sheetcake printer, but they also had a very 3-d robotic flower maker, which couldn't make anything bigger than, say, a drink coaster, as far as I know all it did was make different flower species, but what amazing little flowers it could make... She could mix her flower frosting color to appropriately match the bridesmaid dresses and the robot made flowers that matched the real world floral arrangemen
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Are you sure the really important part is not perhaps "3D"?
I've seen cakes with all kinds of images printed on them, but all in 2D. They were basically just photographs printed with colored sweet stuff. All 3D things like a wedding couple that you find on a wedding cake were pre-made in factories and placed on top.
-- I'm waiting for a 3D beer printer. Oh, wait, it's called a beer tap.
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Yeah but that was using American Chocolate. Not real chocolate.
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to be honest we got bored inventing the TV, Telephone, WWW and the computer, i'd be pretty sure your Grannie's chocolate printer was copied from a similar device we had in Victorian London, saying that as we have the best University in the World, i.e Cambridge, (beats Harvard, Princeton) then i shudder to think what your PHD's are doing if ours are making chocolate
Not first can't spell (Score:2)
Butter! (Score:1)
Now if someone could make one of these that used butter they could totally own at state fairs across the country!
What if I just printed the word...... (Score:1)
wife and /. (Score:1)
yawn.. big deal (Score:2)
OK.. we've had 3d prototyping printers for a while, changing the medium you're prototyping with isn't 'OMG NEWS!' it's 'oh hai, we twiddled some bits and adjusted
some temps.. now it can do chocolate too instead of resin!'
I mean.. MakerBot has been around for 2 years already, and I have demos of industrial Rapid Prototyping machines (a handy working spanner wrench!) for over a decade.
Am I the only person that says 'OK we made 3d printers.. so now we can print almost anything form 3D so long as someone engine
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Cake Accessories (Score:2)
Where did they get the money for research? (Score:1)
I could understand the possibility of a commercial company researching this.... because it has potential commercial applications. However, this was done at a university -- an institution of education. How did convince people to give them money to research this? Am I missing something?
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Maybe the research was funded by a chocolatier.
Maybe the complexity of achieving the correct temperature for the chocolate to allow it to be used as a building material, instead of clogging the delivery mechanism or flowing away was a non-trivial problem with applications in multiple fields.
Maybe the publicity generated will secure funding for the university and/or increase their student intake.
Maybe the researcher likes chocolate.
What's wrong with researching this? Sure, Fark's probably subtitled it with "
"chocolate-printer" ... not "chocolate printer" (Score:2)
Note the hyphen. A "chocolate printer" would be a printer made out of chocolate. And that would be news, not this.
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Note the hyphen. A "chocolate printer" would be a printer made out of chocolate. And that would be news, not this.
If they based their design on the self-replicating RepRap [reprap.org] then they should be able to use it to print out a chocolate chocolate-printer.
What I Want... (Score:2)
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They'll taste better in memory.
Sheesh (Score:2)
Chocolate has a lot of social purpose
Things only a scientist would say for $500, Alex.
First published in 2009? (Score:2)
This guy didn't nearly the amount of press but here's the article from 2009. I've seen on print chocolate at a convention / maker faire before too but I don't know who owned it.
http://builders.reprap.org/2009/03/chocolate-extruder.html [reprap.org]
It would be interesting if they really did reinvent the wheel instead of copying everything that already exists though. Hopefully they will publish their plans.
As much use as a... (Score:2)
After building the printer, they fired up their 3D modelling software, loaded the first demo file they found and proceeded to print out a chocolate teapot.
Perhaps they should have taken the hint?
Obligatory model (Score:1)