15. WildCard Week¶

And it went wild ! Decided to work on a machine just by it’s name you can tell it’s a joy . The PanCake Bot !!

Preparations¶

“Delicious” Material¶

To make PanCakes , you need batter ! To minimize the risk of unhappy events , I used a ready mixture that just needs adding milk

Packed all the tools needed and headed to the lab .

Machine¶

The lovely PanCake Bot

It came with a manual on how to assemble , which was pretty easy .

You just assemble , power and start heating the griddle .

Software¶

Its makers released a software to generate Gcodes for the machine , called PancakePainter

A very easy software , where you can draw from scratch or trace images .

4 degrees of cooking the batter are available to custom your design .

Off to cooking¶

File¶

I started with drawing something , a letter N , to get a sense of the settings .

Then I select to Export for Printing , which opened a set of settings , Most important were :

I believe you should try and print anything first that consists of lines , so you can measue your line width correctly . As it depends on how thick the batter is .

Also depends on batter , It’s where the pump should stop extruding . So , no extra dripping happens outside the shape being drown .

I preferred turning this on , it filled the shape much better . Turning this off will result in drawing the infill concentric / parallel to outline .

Very important to test until sweet point where you don’t miss any parts or over-extrude at the beginning or the end .

Mainly , it’s all about testing and finding what wirks for your batter .

Then you save your file on a SD card and insert in the machine .

Printing¶

First load the batter as instructed in the manual and you heat the Pan , Between Medium and Low worked nice for me .

Then through the control you choose your file and hit start .

Of course , the testing process and the most creative shapes , Just kidding they’re ugly !

A very important trick was to keep editing the Flow , through the pressure knob , and the speed the nozzle moved , through Arrows , So the batter is printed in a nice consistant line .

Not Sure if this was the right way to do it , but I decided to lower the pressure when printing the outline , then raise it through the infill .

These were my first tries ..