3d food printer

spring 2018

My first independent project was a 3d food printer I made for our "senior project" in my last month of high school. I've always loved playing with food, experimenting with presentation and texture, and exploring new methods and recipes. Also at the time I was getting really excited by 3d printing and additive manufacturing processes, so I decided to try to make a 3d food printer!

After doing some initial research on types and structures of 3d printers, I decided on a 3 axis cartesian printer for my design, with the extruder moving in X and Z (two motors) and the bed in Y. This design is very similar to many hobbyist printer models like Prusa or Ender.

I CADed the design with Solidworks and bought many of the standard parts online, five NEMA stepper motors, linear rails, lead screws, couplers, and belts. Most parts I decided to make out of wood due to simplicity and my comfort with wood. However, there were a few oddly shaped parts that required precision, so I 3d printed them using the free public 3d printers located in many libraries in the San Mateo county (ironic, right?)

Through the process of fabrication and assembly, I ran into a lot of issues with alignment due to imprecisions in wood machining. Since all axes run on linear rails, the relative alignment of the rails and belt motion is very important and encouraged me to rethink wood for future frame designs.

For X and Y motion, I integrated and tensioned timing belts and ran them with stepper motors, which, though challenging to do properly, proved to be an ideal level of speed and precision control. The Z axis was run with two steppers that spun lead screws to lift or lower the carriage.

Finally for the extruder, I used a syringe connected to a noncaptive stepper motor, which is a motor that has a threaded through-hole such that a lead screw can move linearly through it when the motor spins. This made it such that as the motor spun, it would push down the piston of the syringe and extrude the material inside.

After completing the assembly, wiring up and controlling the printer was next. I used an Arduino and RAMPS 1.7 board with DRV8825 motor controllers to run the stepper motors. The RAMPS 1.7 board is a shield for the Arduino that automatically translates provided gcodes into motor commands for the steppers, in addition to controlling heating, extrusion, sensor inputs, and other 3d printer commands.

Used in conjunction with the motor controllers and Arduino, I was able to get the board to control X, Y, and Z motion of the steppers and eventually perform a printing sequence!

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