Building our April Fool’s Day project, the MarshMallowMatic, was a fun project but not without its fair share of trial and error. When heating flammable materials with an oxy-fuel torch, the biggest challenge is simply not setting them on fire.
In the video above — one of our first trials, before we had figured out how far away to position the flame — we wondered what would happen if we tried to “evenly” roast a marshmallow… with predictable results. Let’s just consider this an outtake.
Introducing the MarshMallowMatic: the world’s first dedicated CNC marshmallow toasting machine— capable of custom marking and toasting of marshmallows under robotic control.
The MarshMallowMatic is built from a special, modified version of our Ostrich Eggbot kit, fitted with a compact oxy-fuel torch:
The oxy-fuel torch can produce a 1″ (2.5 cm) long flame, with temperature in excess of 5000 °F (2760 °C). “And wow, can it toast marshmallows!”
Happy birthday to us! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is now three years old.
To celebrate, we’re rounding up our most interesting projects from this past year.
Quick projects and observations:
The monetary density of things
Contact Lens Case Small Parts Tray
Simple LED Projects:
Quick, easy, temporary, and beautiful LED garden lights
Food Hacking:
South Indian Restaurant Menu Decoder
Improved Custom Message Hearts
CandyFab
Papercraft
Electronics Projects
Interactive LED Dining Table Circuit
Dark detecting jack-o’-lantern
Kit Projects
Crafty Projects
Microcontroller Projects
Tennis for Two, a video game from 1958
Scariest Jack-o’-Lantern of 2008
Geek Design
(Whew!)
With a little help from a square springform pan, you too can have an Apple apple pie for dessert!
Continue reading Now that’s an Apple Pie!
One of the things that we kept hearing as a comment about our CNC toast story is that we really should be printing the Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwiches, or something like that.
As it turned out, by the time that we actually wrote about our toasting, we had already moved on to bigger and (probably) better things, like printing sugar. Since we were rushing to get ready for Maker Faire, we didn’t get a chance to make more creative toast.
But, Maker Faire has come and gone, and we’ve finally got our machine reassembled, and so here we are toasting again. Believe it or not, this is actually a step in the right direction for CandyFab as well, because these were printed at 20 DPI, already an improvement with four times as many pixels as our previous batches at 10 DPI. These four Flying Spaghetti Monster images on toast are adapted from the original artwork in pencil, by Bobby Henderson.
Oh yeah, and I put one of them on eBay. =D
In February we gave a sneak preview of our project to construct a home-built three dimensional fabricator. Our design goals were (1) a low cost design leveraging recycled components (2) large printable volume emphasized over high resolution, and (3) ability to use low-cost printing media including granulated sugar. We are extremely pleased to be able to report that it has been a success: Our three dimensional fabricator is now fully operational and we have used it to print several large, low-resolution, objects out of pure sugar.
Continue reading Solid freeform fabrication: DIY, on the cheap, and made of pure sugar
One small slice of bread, one giant leap for toasters.
Continue reading Finally, CNC toast!
