Chocolate FDM Printer

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Directed towards the luxury and culinary market, the Iowa 3D Club started a project on a FDM printer that would use a pneumatic driving system to extrude chocolate and fuse multiple 2D voxels into a solid 3D geometry.

Once we attained 4 stepper motors, an arduino MEGA, a RAMPS 1.4 shield, A4988 Stepper motor drivers, limit switches, we were able to create the linear stages and extruding mechanism.






The underside of the print bed is lined with a nylon tubing coil that has pumped cold water flowing through it. A fan channeling cold air to the print surface will be implemented next, while trying to isolate heat loss from the heated syringe extruder itself.





Upon multiple iterations of mechanical components and fixtures for the minimization of dead space, the feedrate, nozzle diameter, and temperature settings are still being tested. 

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