There’s nothing like creating your own chocolate lollipop and candy treats. Creating chocolate molds has traditionally been a complicated process. By using 3D printing technology, chocolate makers can just replicate any 3D objects in chocolate.
Fouche Chocolates, a company in Centurion, South Africa is producing chocolates and cake decorations with 3D printing. Hans Fouche, owner of Fouche Chocolates, has built his own 3D printers to create intricate, three-dimensional chocolates sculptures. With his engineering background, he builds or customises almost every machine in his workshop.
“I could not have done this if I wasn’t an engineer, it would have all been too expensive,” Fouche told htxt.africa. For creating unique chocolate sculptures, Fouche built an eight-extruder RepRap-style 3D chocolate printer to work with chocolate. He was then contacted by Nestle and the Museum of African Design to help produce a series of 3D printed chocolate sculptures for an exhibition in the Maboneng Precinct. The exhibition was intended to celebrate the launch of Google’s latest operating system, Android 4.4, and Fouche’s 3D printed chocolate sculptures received worldwide attention from the media.
“A lot of the designs were very ambitious,” Fouche says, “It was only through our experience with 3D printing chocolate that we were able to help the artists to realise what is actually possible. The best are always simple and not over complicated, because chocolate is difficult to work with, it does not support itself very well….”
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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