James is making a 3D chocolate printer out of Lego and documenting it as he goes in his blog.
We've developed a print head that will print 5mm 'pixels' of the consumable. It basically acts as a pump. Its a medium sized lego gear (driven by a worm gear attached to the motor) with four axels that repeatedly squeaze and release a pipe attached to a funnel that holds the consumables. a half-rotation of this wheel yeilds a blob…
Green and Black's 72% cocoa organic chocolate seems to be the stuff. Stick it in the microwave, melt it, and pour it into the funnel. Rather than trying to be scientific about this we've taken the brute force plan and simply melted as many different types of chocolate as we could. We got lucky however, and hit on Green and Black's pretty quickly. The really nice thing about this particular consumable seems to be that it retains heat for a long time, and still prints a similar sized blob as it cools.
(via Waxy)
