Duke Students Create Chocolate Drone #drone #droneday
Will take one dark chocolate, 85%+ cocoa, thank you! From The Chronicle:
The idea of an edible drone initially came up a year ago while Thakkar was having coffee with a friend. Whenever he had time, he said he would make it happen. Thakkar mentioned the idea in passing to his friends Lindner and Succop.
“Knowing Anuj is the kind of guy that relentlessly pursues an idea, no matter how far-fetched it seems, until it’s accomplished, I didn’t even question him,” Succop wrote.
While the three students were at Duke over the summer, they became more and more motivated to start prototyping an edible drone. They attempted with three other foods before deciding on chocolate. They explained that cheese was too ugly and oily, jell-o was too heavy and bread was too difficult to mold. However, chocolate was moldable, light and appealing.
The team initially tried to construct the drone using a 3D-printed negative mold, which involves pouring melted chocolate into the mold, Lindner said. However, they ran into issues when trying to remove the plastic mold because the chocolate kept breaking.
Instead, the team used a positive 3D-printed mold, where they poured the chocolate around the mold and let it solidify. They then removed the plastic, leaving a chocolate shell. Lindner explained that they modified a drone by removing as much of the shell as they could and replacing it with chocolate, while leaving the electronics.
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