Household 3D Cream Printer for Cake Decoration

Making beautifully decorated cakes at home can be a great joy for baking hobbyist especially during the time of social distancing. However, creating beautiful patterns on the cake is a labor-intensive task that requires a significant amount of skills. For novice bakers to create amazing custom cake decoration, 3D printers can be an invaluable tool. Since its invention in the 1980s, 3D printing technology has evolved significantly to enable various new fabrication capabilities. In the last decade, the food industry has also started to adopt this technology for printing chocolates, candies, dough, or meat. 3D printing has amazing flexibility to realize customized designs with complex geometry, which makes it ideal for cake decoration. Moreover, 3D printers have become widely available as affordable consumer electronics. Therefore, to reduce human labor and skill requirements, we intend to repurpose a 3D printer for cake decoration, which has not been realized before. In this poster, we present the design of a Cream 3D Printer for cake decoration at home. The system is designed to create the desired geometry with cream, produce multiple materials/colors and be affordable (hundreds of dollars). For the initial investigation, the prototype design is modified from a Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printer. The four primary subsystems include a 3-axis motion system, a material extruder, control algorithms, and an environment control chamber. For the 3-axis motion system, a Creality Ender 3 Pro 3D printer is selected as the basic structure since it is affordable, opensource, and well-supported by its community. The plastic material extruder is replaced by a custom-designed cream extruder. Whipped cream is placed in multiple syringes pushed by the slider on lead screws actuated by stepper motors. Plastic tubes are used to guide the cream from the syringes to the nozzle for ejection. Multiple nozzles or a single nozzle with multi-way valves can be used to select materials from the syringes. For the control system, G-code generated by the slicer from a Solidworks 3D design can be directly used for single material printing. To select between multiple materials, a custom Python program processes the G-code and uses serial communication to interface with the 3D printer Marlin firmware and an Arduino microcontroller. The environmental control chamber helps to cool the printed cream and improve its rigidity so that complex 3D shapes can be printed. The temperature control can be realized with simple commercial refrigeration systems. At the current stage, the single nozzle cream extrusion capability is completed for the cream 3D printer. Coordinated control of the Ender 3 Pro 3-axis motion system and the custom nozzle has been realized for cream printing. We are currently investigating the effects of temperature and other printing parameters for various potential cream mixtures to identify the configurations suitable for printing. The multi-material printing capability will be developed after identifying suitable materials. With the 3D cream printer, we hope to empower novice baking hobbyist to create amazing cake decoration withoutyears of practice.