This week the team presented at FDR with our final prototype! Prior to FDR the team has been busy re-printing our housing, completing lots of prints with our intended dough/frosting combo, and finalizing our slide deck and final deliverables. On FDR we were able to demo a simple print with dough and a filling of frosting. Check out our table below:
Our FDR Booth with printed samples and our machine running
Our new motors in the black PLA housing & first layer of our print
A big thank you to Brian and Tom from Newell Brands making the drive up to see our demo and final presentation! Many thanks to Brian & Coach Jackson for all of your help and guidance in supporting the team through our design work and testing.
As the countdown to the final week before FDR begins, the team has been diligently putting the finishing touches on the prototype to ensure it’s fully prepared for the ultimate presentation and demonstration! This involves several tasks, such as extending the wires of the new motor, adjusting the housing dimensions for accommodating larger motors, and completing the multimaterial DOE.
New Nema 23 motors
Regarding the multimaterial print, the team intends to craft a base using a no-bake cookie dough infused with fruit jelly, topped off with buttercream frosting. This novel cookie dough base underwent testing this week and proved to be resilient while remaining relatively easy to extrude. Additionally, experiments were conducted using larger nozzle tips (2mm) to mitigate clogging issues observed with smaller nozzles.
Measuring the shape fidelity for layer height
The team was also able to take some measurements of the dough prints to measure the shape fidelity of the printer.
New CAD of well design with cookie dough base
In previous weeks, the 3-3 printhead occasionally generated ghost prints due to material leakage even in the absence of active extrusion. To address this, the team has been evaluating stop valves to enable users to deactivate inactive tubes and thus eliminate these residual prints. After thorough valve testing, a stop valve was selected that maintains optimal pressure levels without causing extrusion delays or interruptions.
New stope valves to prevent leaking during the print with 3-3 printhead
The team has also been busy wrapping up our final deliverables: FDR presentation, FDR poster, FDR video, volumes 1-5 of the written design report, lab notebooks, & of course polishing our design & completing lots of test prints. Take a look at our FDR poster below:
This week we are in the final stretch of our prototype development and trying to make as much progress as possible before the end of the project and preparing for FDR. This week we spent time exploring component selections and testing using a kind of valve in our nozzle design.
We made great progress and greatly improved the print quality and mostly eliminated the issue of mixing materials that the single nozzle design was producing.
Additionally we made our first version of our product video! We are still working on editing and producing the final draft, but great job so far Lucas!
This week- we had a great Spring PID for Team 3Delish. Ian and Lucas were definitely happy about it (see below)! Thank you to all of the amazing judges for the feedback, we are excited to implement them and finish out the project strong.
Much printing progress has been made in lab. We are continuing testing with different materials, along with different additives included as well. The no-bake carrot cake bar dough base (made by Lucas) has been printing well in lab!
We are also excited that our product now looks very close to our CAD- thanks to some helpful 80/20 brackets and fasteners! Brittney & Caylynne have been leading efforts on the extrusion module, while Ian has been working greatly on the printhead and nozzle design. Our last few weeks will be focused on minimizing any food backflow, optimizing the G-code printing parameters, implementing heating elements, and finalizing food recipes & manuals.
Last but not least, quick shoutout to Team Surgigauge for gifting us a carrot for recipe testing! Lucas is very excited to make more carrot puree for the team. Thanks Surgigauge!
This week, the team made an incredible breakthrough: a multi-material print! A very simple treat of carrot paste and buttercream frosting composed the layers of this new print. See Brittney and Caylynne below after triumphing.
After some delay due to shipping difficulties, the new Octopus Pro motherboard has come in and is all wired and good to go. Andrew spent some long hours making sure everything is in tip top shape for PID next week.
Lucas has going through carrots like nobody’s business as the team is going into crunch-time recipe development. Carrots are disappearing faster than Bugs Bunny can say “What’s up Doc?”
Happy Easter weekend to all! Make sure to hide your pointy orange vegetables, otherwise the 3Delish- sponsored nondescript springtime holiday rabbit will snatch them up.
The new motherboard has been received and wired up, but it’s slightly different from our previous board and we’re having difficulties flashing the hardware to fit to our current printer set-up. A new version of the motherboard as been ordered and should arrive soon. The second time’s the charm!
Additional design work is ongoing, especially since the current food cartridge set-up was a contributing factor to the outage. As the mechanical/electrical work continues to put the printer back online, more testing will be conducted to finalize printing parameters. Recipe testing is ongoing!
With the motherboard offline, food printing has been halted. The team is working on other areas of our project, including a draft for the storyboard and script for a product video showcasing our final prototype. Stay tuned–the video is expected to be unveiled for the Final Design Review on April 23rd.
This week the team began working on creating our outline for the Final Design Report(FDR). The team prepared a brief outline on the various volumes that go into FDR including our process documentation, test procedures and results, and a video concept. These items were shared with our liaison and coach, whom provided valuable feedback we will include in our submission.
ELECTRICAL
While the team presented the FDR outline to the liasion and coach, Andrew met with Dr. Ge, who is an electrical engineer that specializes in power, to discuss some potential concerns regarding our chamber heating. Together they discussed how to tackle the discrepencies in voltage and power for the different heating elements that will be used. From there they performed some power calculations to further justify the solution Andrew had proposed. We look forward to seeing how the testing for the new heating elements go!
SETBACKS
Although the team made some good progress this week, we unfortunately faced a setback when a metal clamp was left too close to the board and shorted one of the integrated circuits on the board.
The red circle indicates the component that was shorted
The team did not feel comfortable testing the board again after the short happened in order to avoid any further damage to the external componenets. A new board has been ordered and we plan to get back to material testing as soon as we wire it back up!
This week the team presented at QRB2 with major progress in our printing prototype! Our presentation focused on the milestones that the team has accomplished with G-code controlled motor movement via the motherboard install, extrusion with the non-captive stepper motors, heat element verification & material property testing with even more types of food!
Regarding the motherboard, Andrew and Ian successfully demonstrated motor movement for all six motors connected to the new motherboard. Additionally, we highlighted the functionality of the three heating elements currently linked to the board, along with their heating response over time.
Heater cartridges with thermistors to heat the nozzle
In terms of motors, Caylynne and Brittney provided insights into our current prints achievable with materials such as frosting, jelly, and peanut butter. Moving forward, our focus is on optimizing printing parameters to enhance print resolution. This optimization process will be material-specific, as different materials may necessitate varying extrusion speeds and printhead speeds to achieve uniform lines in each layer.
Peanut butter printing with line bed design
First 3D model print with new nozzles and frosting
On the material science front, Lucas and Liying shared data on force requirements versus extension rates for new materials like cream cheese and carrot purées. Our next steps involve narrowing down the most successful materials for extrusion and conducting additive testing to explore how these ingredients can aid in post-print material setup.
Lucas also made some delicious no-bake cheesecake bars for our QRB2 that were a real show-stopper! We hope to continue recipe testing and get some of these bars printed soon.
Special spotlight: Lucas with his homemade no-bake bars for QRB2!
This week we all pulled together to get ourselves ready for QRB and make as much progress as possible to present to the review board.
Printing
Caylynne and Brittney made some great progress in getting the printer to produce actual prints. We still have a lot of tuning to go in order to reach the quality we’d like to see, but this is a great start and they produced some great videos to show the judges. We look forwards to seeing the quality and speed of the prints continue to improve as testing continues.
Print test with new linear extruder and multi-material printhead.
Material Testing
Over the last week Liying and Lucas have been experimenting more with the Instron, getting data on how more materials extrude and behave in a printer. Thanks to our sponsor Newell we have a new blender to try purees, pastes, and other blended products in our testing. They used this blender to blend carrots into paste as well as testing cream cheese.
Board Integration/Testing
This week Ian and Andrew worked on producing a test program to demonstrate the ability of the printer to read and correctly follow gcode, including heating independent nozzles, moving all axis, and moving the Extruders. Additionally they tested the heaters and ran an experiment to track their accuracy and temperature stability.
Another amazing week of progress for Team 3DELISH as QRB#2 nears! You probably know the drill by now but let’s take a look at what each subteam has been up to this week.
Mechanical
This week’s focus for Caylynne and Brittney have been to test the traditional Nema 17 motor, two new non-captive Nema 17 motors, and the non-captive Nema 23. Special shoutout to Dr. Kimberly Stubbs for meeting with our Mechanical team this week to highlight some super helpful information about motor performance and quantifying the data effectively! Pictured below is the traditional Nema 17 being testing to print jelly at an E-step of 800 steps/mm.
I’m sure you’ve missed our mashed potato prints but don’t worry- there is more of that coming! Pictured below is mashed potato being extruded from one of our new non-captive Nema 17 motors at three different E-steps. Looks great, right?
Oh, and a sneak peek for next week… food printing testing using all 3 motors AND Ian’s amazing initial printhead design w/tubing!
Ian’s 3tube-to-1nozzle printhead design has been sent off to be 3D printed and we should be testing next week! Great work, Ian!
Electrical
Andrew has been focusing on the temperature control connections of our new board and connecting all of our new motors successfully! Andrew and Ian have also been modifying and working on G-code files.
Materials
The Materials team is taking some time off from Instron testing, and focusing now on food materials! This upcoming week, we will be meeting with Dr. Schneider from food science to learn more about design considerations for food product development and food safety.
