Automated Cookie Cutters: Plastic!

The jellyfish cookie cutter and press look about the way you’d expect:

Jellyfish Cookie Cutter and Press - separate — Jellyfish Cookie Cutter and Press – separate

They’re a bit more impressive on the build platform, where the skirt thread around the perimeter extends slightly beyond the usual 100 mm width limit into the no-go zone behind the nozzle wiper. The bizarre lighting from the warm-white front LEDs and the cool-white overhead LED ring emphasizes the 3D features:

Jellyfish Cookie Cutter - on build platform — Jellyfish Cookie Cutter – on build platform

Somewhat to my surprise, the gritty nature of the bitmap source image didn’t cause a problem. The perimeters consist of many tiny segments, but most of the time goes to filling the interior (20% density, square pattern) and covering the flat surfaces, so the whole thing chugs along at a pretty good pace. Overall, it took something over an hour.

So, given a height-map grayscale image:

I (and you!) can automatically create the solid model of a matched cookie cutter and press:

jellyfish-high - Cutter and Press - top view — jellyfish-high – Cutter and Press – top view

And then we can produce as many chunks of plastic as needed for our baking session!

Printing that huge block of plastic did, however, uncover two longstanding mechanical problems. More tomorrow…

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