Wild Card 📋

🕘 Date / Time:

Hello dear fellow 😊. Welcome to the final task I had to do for Fab Academy 2020 (Pandemic Version).
I had no clue what to do for that week and I do not like composites that much, so that I got excited as well as relieved when my colleage Abdelrahman mentioned that we've got "The Pancake Bot" in our lab and he suggested that I could use it for this week.

Learning Resources

All I wanted to know was:
1- The extention of the file used and whether we use a special software to generate it.
2- How to use the machine itself.
3- How to make a propper pancake batter for the perpose of printing.
I did some research on Youtube and got to these videos (overview, software & trial )

Approach:

1- I searched the internet for the perfect pancake recipe and found this one which seemed alright.
2- I ordered the ingredients from a nearby supermarket.
3- I searched the lab for a mixer, a bowl and some tools to use.
4- The ingredients of the recipe was in cups, teaspoons and tablespoons, so I searched the internet for their equivilent in weight (grams).

Software steps:

First off I had to choose a desgin with distinctive black and white parts. I had to decide between a penguin and a panda. Apparently the panda won :D

Then I pasted the drawing in Gimp to add colours.

That was the final look before exporting it as .png for the pancake bot software.^^

To generate the gcode the first thing I did was to download and install the software.

This was the interface of the pancake painter software, I uploaded the reference image by choosing automatic tracing for logos and cartoons.

That was the generated image after I edited a little bit to add another shade.

Baking steps:

Here starts the most fun paaaaaaaaaaaart. 😍

I now have every thing ready for this mission (a scale, a mixer, the ingredients and the pancake bot )

There are the dry ingredients (sugar, flour, salt and baking powder)

And here we have the wet ingredients (eggs, oil, milk and vanilla).

This image shows the two bowls full of dry and wel ingredients separately after having been measured.

I mixed the wet ingredients first then started adding the dry mixture gradually while mixing.

Having done all the mixing the batter was so thick. It was perfect for a regular pancake but not for this application. (I've learnt that it should not be thick from the Crazy Russian Hackervideo)

Getting done with mixing and reaching a suitable consistency, I poured the mixture into the bot's bottle. (Make sure that the bottom sillicone lid is on before filling.)

I adjusted the temperature of the heated bed to somewhere between warm and low and that was perfect.

Ths was the first layer of the first panda trial .

This funny incomplete panda was the result of the first trial.😄

Observations:

The panda shaped pancake turned out incomplete.
Possible reasons:
1- Batter was too thick for the settings I set the machine to.
2- Machine is moving too fast.
3- The bottle pressure is low (weakly pushing the batter out).

My solution:
1- Adding a little bit more milk to the batter.
2- Decreasing the suction by increasing pressure inside the bottle.

Ths was the first layer of the final panda trial .

That was the final and the best result I had.😄

Downloadables: 💾

Panda AutoCAD fileHere
Panda file.gcodeHere
Panda file.pbpHere

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