Edible Art M&M Printer

We built a working 2-axis M&M Printer... in less than two months

Our team of five(Ariana Olson, Anne Ku, Justin Kunimune, Liv Kelley, and I) set out to build an edible art 2D printer for our Principles of Engineering mechatronics class.

Our printer converts a simple input image, such as a Github user logo, into "pixels." It then represents each pixel by dropping M&Ms onto a frosted brownie- edible artwork!

The Gantry

Principles of Engineering encourages students to work within a restricted budget.

We cannibalized the stepper motors and belts from an inkjet printer from our local dump, and lasercut scrap MDF to create the gantry base of our printer. We controlled the motors using an Arduino Uno equipped with an Adafruit motor shield. Using limit switches, we wrote a calibration routine to determine the location of the "extruder" over our dessert.

Our gantry

Solidworks Gantry Assembly

The Extruder

We initially planned to extrude nonpareils to create the edible artwork on our dessert. Despite experimenting with several hopper and dispenser designs, however, it proved too difficult to dispense a single nonpareil.

As a result, we pivoted to printing with M&Ms. The smooth, hard candy coating prevented friction-based breakage, unlike nonpareils, and the relatively larger size of candy made it possible to load "cartridges" of single M&Ms.

Nonpareils

M&Ms

The Software

Our software stack had two major components:

An OpenCV based image converter, which segmented the image and converted it into a bytestream of printer "pixels" to be printed
A motion manager, which converted the desired locations into serial commands for each stepper motor