Cookie Icing Printer
A 2-axis gantry system that dispenses icing onto cookies from custom-sliced designs, controlled by a VEX brain running a purpose-built slicer and motion format.
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Further details
Prototyping
The full system was designed in CAD before anything was built. A handful of test parts were laser cut early on to validate the design, including wooden rack and pinion sets for the gantry and adapter pieces for testing fit and tolerance on our aluminium rod linear rail system, which were built independently rather than buying linear slides due to cost.
Software Design
Wrote a custom slicer along with a lightweight, G-code-style command format built around integers instead of floating point values, keeping processing overhead low enough to run entirely on the VEX brain's 128 MB of RAM. Aside from slicing, the rest of the printer's operation fits entirely inside that same memory budget.
Final Tuning
Most of the remaining work was tuning parameters in software rather than hardware, dialing in syringe dispensing time and the pause time after each dispense so the gantry doesn't move and splatter icing, before the syringe has fully settled.