Tag Archives: cnc

The CandyFab 6000

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CandyFabLogo-color

Today we are relaunching the CandyFab Project with a new logo and a new wiki site, wiki.candyfab.org.

But more importantly, we are unveiling this new machine, the CandyFab 6000:

CF6k

It’s a brand new CandyFab– still in beta. A clean break, designed from the ground up with almost no parts in common with the original, the CandyFab 4000. All new mechanics. All new electronics. All new software. Smaller but still big: the build volume is more than 10 liters, but it’s now small enough to fit on a desk top.

second

Here’s one of the first objects that we fabbed on the CandyFab 6000: a drilled sphere, about two inches in diameter and layer thickness of 1/15 inch. There’s plenty of room for improvement, and finally we have a machine that can be improved.

Window-2

The machine is designed so that it can be made from scratch– i.e., without dumpster diving for old HP pen plotters. Three axes of quadrature-encoded DC servo motor control. Timing belts and acme lead screws. Food-safe sugar containment. The body is made from laser-cut plywood with acrylic highlights and stainless steel hardware. (Steampunk-compliant brass thumbscrews where appropriate, too.)

Zuccherino

The new modular electronics control platform is called Zuccherino— that’s italian for “Sugar cube.” One Arduino-compatible circuit board per axis. (Our prototype above shows X,Y,Z, Heat, and Air axes, plus a master board.)

It’s an expandable system for all kinds of motion control projects, and we’ll be making kit versions of all of the Zuccherino boards later this summer.

We’ve also got new cross platform control software — called CandyFabulous underway, and it’s looking sweet.

Printing

And… oh can it fab sugar. In the photo here we’re partway through printing an hollow torus eight inches in diameter.

Where from here? Check out more details at CandyFab Project.

Finally, you can see the CandyFab 6000 first hand– this weekend at Maker Faire! We’ll be showing it off at booth #293, in the Expo Hall.

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CandyFab @ Dorkbot: 8/15/07 @ TechShop

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symmetric view 2

On Wednesday, August 15 we’ll be giving a presentation about CandyFab at a meeting of Dorkbot SF, our local spinoff of
Dorkbot NYC.

Dorkbot chapters organize monthly talks and events for artists, scientists, and engineers centered around the theme of “the creative use of electricity.”

The meeting will be held at 7:30 PM at TechShop, a San Francisco Bay Area “open-access public workshop,” located just off of 101 in Menlo Park, where you can go use a wide range of tools and machines to make things. We’ll be bringing the CandyFab machine along, and– if everything goes right– demonstrating its use. So if you’re in the SF bay area, this is a great chance to come and take a close look at the CandyFab 4000, smell the caramel, and ask questions. Besides our talk and demo, there will be a couple of shorter presentations on other dorkbot-ish topics, and an introduction to TechShop. (Tours of Techshop will be available at the end of the meeting as well.)

Everyone is welcome to come to the meeting; there is a $5 suggested donation for the venue at the door.

[Link] See you there!

UPDATE: The event was great! (Read more here.)

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Printing complex shapes: A sugar chain

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Sugar Chain We made this chain of twelve giant links on the CandyFab 4000 to demonstrate the fabrication of a complex object, the sort that is difficult to make by conventional machining processes. You can see the 3D model and some build pictures for this monstrosity over at CandyFab.org.

This object also highlights the relatively large build envelope of the CandyFab– significantly larger than that of most other low end (i.e., under $50k) 3D fabrication systems.

PS for Chemistry geeks: insert joke about long-chain hydrocarbons here.

 

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A few more sugar sculptures

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Sugar Soliton

This is a rendering of the sculpture Soliton by Bathsheba Grossman, as output by the CandyFab 4000; it’s a three-dimensional form made out of pure sugar. Seeing Bathsheba’s sculptures at the 2006 Maker Faire was the inspiration for us to build the machine in the first place, so it’s quite exciting to be able to print this. (The design is used by her kind permission– please buy some of her sculptures!)

This is our second try at fabbing this difficult shape. Our first attempt was at a somewhat smaller size and ran into trouble with the thin beams when *one* of our thin horizontal layers turned out to be too weakly bonded. To avoid a second failure, we enlarged the model but also ran the heater element very hot and for an extended period of time to make the pixels srong, but also larger, more rounded, and richer in color– a darker caramel.

In this view we’re looking right down at the printed layers of sugar; we think that the grain of the layers makes this look a lot like a wood carving.

Of course, that’s not all that we’ve been printing this week. Here is one more large-scale object that we made:

mobius monster

The shape is a 3/4 twist mobius strip with a square cross section and windows cut at regular intervals in all of the sides the side. Even though it’s hollow, it still weighs seven pounds and fourteen ounces– that’s a lot of sugar. We’re bringing this monster to Maker Faire this weekend, so you can see it for yourself, too.

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Sneak preview: The Evil Mad Scientist 3D Printer Project

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X & Y Axes

Did you enjoy making sugar cube sculptures as a kid? Boy have we got a project for you.
Besides the projects that we post here each week, we’ve been working on some larger scale projects in the past year. One of these is almost done, and we’re ready to give you a sneak preview: It’s a home-built, DIY, CNC, 3D printer, that uses granulated sugar as the printing medium. This is still a work in progress, but we’re making rapid progress and we hope to show off the completed printer at the Bay Area Maker Faire in May.

(Update added 5/9/2007: we’ve got it working now.)

The printable volume is 24 x 13.5 x 9 inches, with programmed resolution of 1000 steps per axis. We expect effective pixel size to be in the range of 2-5 mm. In other words, it makes fairly large, but fairly low resolution, models out of sugar. Think of it as a way to make giant and amazing sugar cube sculptures!
Continue reading Sneak preview: The Evil Mad Scientist 3D Printer Project →

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