MAKE: Blog: Finally, CNC toast!

Finally, CNC toast!

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You've wanted it for years and Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories brings CNC toast to the masses -

A few weeks ago, we rounded up a bunch of high tech toasters and wrote about about using a hot-air gun to draw designs, by hand, on fancy toast. We've now mounted the hot air gun to a computer-controlled X-Y control system so that we can use it to print arbitrary images on toast.

The hot air gun that we've used is actually intended to be the printing head of our 3D sugar printer, where it serves to selectively fuse the printing media together.

Recently we succeeded in mounting the hot air gun to the carriage of the printer. The next step was testing the XY motion control system without the Z axis installed.

It turns out that you can actually do some interesting things with just the print head and the X-Y gantry. Especially since, as one of our astute readers noted in a comment, "(3D printer - Z axis) + hot air rework station=completely digital toast imaging technology." Our thoughts exactly.

We certainly aren't the first ones to aim for true CNC toast-- A group of students at Olin College apparently were working towards that goal a few years ago, but may have given up in favor of their laser cutter-- which is (we think) cheating on building a CNC toaster. (Don't get us wrong-- We are of course very fond of laser cutters-- they can be used to cut cake, or engrave matza, or just about anything else. Whether merely ablating away part of your bread with a high power CO2 laser should count as toasting is perhaps debatable, but it's certainly an expensive way to make breakfast.)

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - Finally, CNC toast! - Link.

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