Frostbot: CNC cookie frosting

Posted Dec 30th 2007 8:29PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, tool-hacks

[Brian Schmalz] sent in his Frostbot. It's a fun CNC bot project that he built to frost cookies for his latest holiday party. He (wussed out a bit) and started with a kit based CNC machine, but he made up for it by driving it with his own control hardware (that sparkfun happens to have for sale). His USB bit wacker interface certainly looks interesting - I might consider adding it in front of the stepper controllers on my cnc mill. Especially interesting is the HPGL interpreter software that converts graphics to stepper commands via the bit whacker interface.

Reader Comments

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1. I wonder if anyones tried using 3 primary colors of frosting and a mixing dispenser to make a full color decorator...

Posted at 11:02PM on Dec 30th 2007 by Wolf

2. You would have to flush the old color of frosting out of the dispenser every time you changed colors.
I think it would be easier (and less wasteful) to just color-separate the image and then print each resulting halftone screen onto the cookie in cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Posted at 11:33PM on Dec 30th 2007 by erik

3. it might be useful to enable the bot to ice a cookie moving at a slow speed on a coveyor belt or offsets on a cookie sheet

Posted at 12:30AM on Dec 31st 2007 by cartufer

4. You could set it up so that you had it decorate multiple cookies by creating designs over the same image you want to create, and placing cookies in said locations.

Posted at 12:47AM on Dec 31st 2007 by Sean

5. oh boy... now I want a CNC machine.

Posted at 8:24AM on Dec 31st 2007 by Skyler Orlando

6. Cool. CNC in the kitchen. I never knew I could possibly get my mother into this hobby.

Great idea!

Ivan Irons
http://www.cncinformation.com

Posted at 9:59AM on Dec 31st 2007 by Ivan Irons

7. Check out my frostbot/3d printer that extrudes frosting.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-Polar-3-D-Printer

I built mine out of Legos and I used a Polar, instead of a cartesian, control scheme.

And I am still working out the control software

Posted at 11:15AM on Dec 31st 2007 by Gene Hacker

8. got milk?

Posted at 8:08PM on Dec 31st 2007 by strider_mt2k

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