Hey there Friend,
Today we attempt to summarise the story to date. Unfortunately we didn’t always have this sweet jekyll blog. Back in the myst of time lots of hard work and big discussions took place but unfortunately wasn’t documented. In this post I’m going to attempt to cover the progress and decisions made so far.

Building the ultimaker

On day one we decided to use an ultimaker original plus as the shell for our chocolate printer. The ultimaker is a really reliable 3d printer, its well documented open source project and is constructed from materials we had on hand. This allowed us to get a working base platform together and hack existing files relatively quickly.

nichrome syringe

We needed vessel to hold the melted chocolate in while it was extruded. A syringe was really easy to clean, super cheap, acts as an insulator that heats evenly and has a handy nozzle to attach a tube to. The nichrome drew about 400ma @ 7 volts to heat the chocolate to 30C.

Next up we introduced an auger to drive the chocolate down the tube with a stepper motor instead of the plunger. The stepper is much easier to control and also requires less force to move the melted chocolate down the tube. We printed a number of parts to mount the motor, syringe and auger together.