Ultimately, the goal of Hackaday is to shine a light on the incredible projects coming from the hardware hacking community. In the vast majority of cases, said projects end up being one-off creations — a clever solution that solved a specific problem for the creator, which may or may not be directly applicable to anyone else. But occasionally, perhaps one in every few thousand projects, we see an idea that’s compelling enough to become a commercial product.
Today, we’re happy to add the Cocoa Press to that list. Creator [Ellie Weinstein] has recently unveiled a commercialized version of the chocolate 3D printer she’s been working on for several years, and true to the maker spirit, it’s being offered as a DIY kit. You can currently put a $100 USD deposit on the final product, which is expected to ship before the end of the year. Assembly time is estimated to be around 10 hours and no previous experience with building 3D printers is required, though we’re sure it wouldn’t hurt.
We first came across the Cocoa Press back in 2018, when we ran into it at the World Maker Faire in New York City. That original printer, clad in plywood and festooned with pipes and wires, bears little resemblance to the compact and sleek unit [Ellie] is selling now. But the core idea remains the same — pressure is applied to a syringe filled with warmed chocolate (or potentially other foodstuffs) to smoothly extrude a bead of deliciousness onto the printer’s bed.
The 2018 version used compressed air to force the chocolate out of the nozzle, while the final hardware has switched to a more conventional leadscrew and stepper motor arrangement. Also gone is the complex liquid cooling system used on the prototype. By keeping the chocolate just warm enough to smoothly extrude through the printer’s 0.8 mm nozzle, the new Cocoa Press doesn’t need any cooling at all. Once the chocolate touches the non-heated bed surface it cools and solidifies rapidly.
The Cocoa Press kit is based on the Voron 0.1 design, and uses the ever-popular Marlin firmware, so we’re optimistic about the ability to modify and repair the machine going forward. It’s also fully compatible with popular open source slicers such as PrusaSlicer, so there’s no worries about getting burned with a chocolate-printing-as-a-service contract in the future. There’s no material lock-in either; while the machine has been designed around a specific blend of chocolate, [Ellie] says there’s nothing stopping you from using your own mix.
Compared to the evolved version of the printer we saw during the 2019 Philadelphia Maker Faire, we’re impressed with how small the final product is. The extruder is still far larger than you’d see on a traditional FDM desktop machine, but there’s really no way around that given the system’s design. Trying to pump molten chocolate from a tank located elsewhere on the machine would be a nightmare, so the syringe inside the extruder needs to hold as much material as possible. In this case, that’s 70 grams.
If you’d like to see more of the nuts and bolts of the Cocoa Press kit, check out the walk-through [Ellie] did with [MandicReally] below. We’re eager to see these machines get in the hands of makers, as the ability to create edible 3D prints is one of those technologies that has seemed perennially out of reach for hobbyists.
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