so what'd you do today at work honey i did something it involved white goo in
my mouth what do you get when you combine a 3d
printer with a mini fridge and some confectionary know-how i'll tell you
what you get the coco press a chocolate
3d printer that may just be the most delicious thing that we have ever
reviewed and also one of the most challenging because even under ideal
conditions chocolate is not easy to work
with and extruding it through a tiny nozzle
without clogging or other issues not exactly ideal conditions but the good
news is we learned a lot and we had a ton of fun using it and eating our
mistakes
that's good what's also good is our sponsor glasswire are you lagging out
while gaming use glasswire to see what apps are wasting your bandwidth and
causing your games to lag get 25 off today using code Linus at the link below
damn that is good okay all right i'll put this down for now 3d printing it's
already no walk in the park and that's with plastics one wrong parameter and
you're left with a failed print and a bird's nest of goo which is probably the
biggest advantage of the coco press because with this success or failure
they both taste equally sweet but the road to getting our hands on our
first chocolate printer hasn't been easy the first coco press that got sent to us
got absolutely demolished in shipping and while the replacement machine here
came in much better shape it did still get slightly borked in
transport so i got to put that right out front our experience isn't the complete
picture but we'll give you a bit more detail on that later first let's talk
about the who and maybe more importantly the why
the creator of the coco press evan weinstein started printing with edible
materials in 2014 by modifying a plastic
3d printer with a custom syringe extruder and a bunch of supporting mods
to deal with the difficult thermal control problems that chocolate presents
early versions of the printer used air pressure over a syringe of melted
chocolate which was then cooled by a sub-ambient water cooling loop with a
peltier element that is so cool and not that different from the water-cooled
chair video that we did a while ago b1 wasn't the end however and the coco
press eventually became his capstone project at penn state u with some help
from the pennovation center a startup incubator that's attached to the school
and a small team of materials scientists and maker nerds he eventually created
what stands before us today version four ish now colin's been hands-on with the
coco press for about a week now and as you can see
some of our results are good but others well
we have ones that look quite literally like but we're still really bullish on the
device so let's take a closer look at it it comes with presets for the different
kinds of chocolate that you might want to use and you dial them in up here with
this touchscreen panel you can load a full-size sd card into the right up here
with your print files and if we open up the double pane glass door
we wait we put this stuff in here
lttstore.com right
we find a very unusual print chamber for starters notice the wall to wall to
ceiling to floor stainless steel and complete lack of exposed fasteners this
is to facilitate cleaning for food safety cool right almost as cool
actually not even close as the star of the show the extruder where this differs
from the plastic filament fed machines that we use frequently is under the
cover here we've got a stepper motor hooked up to a syringe with this
stainless steel chamber wrapped in heating pads inside that chamber you
place these pre-tempered and shaped chocolate slugs like so with the inner
cylinder locking into the head on these two locking lugs there are two heater
zones one for the body and one for the nozzle one cool note here is that
there's nothing proprietary about the refills you could put in icing cheese
whiz your own chocolate whatever you want but for the purposes of this video
and limiting our variables we'll be sticking to the included pre-tempered
chocolate which really is delicious by the way
now that takes care of the cnc chocolate
dispensing but as for moving it around that's done with
a core xy motion system corex y is just a fancy way of laying out your motors
and belts that gives a few performance improvements over traditional cartesian
machines in traditional cartesian machines one motor is coupled directly
to one axis of movement but core xy is a
fancier way of laying out your motors and belts that gives a few performance
improvements so in core xy the two motors both work together to produce
motion in just one axis so if we were to
pull on just one belt which you can see
it actually moves diagonally but get
this if we pull on both belts
let's see if i can get in here there you go oh
we can just move along the y-axis
as for the z-axis it's more traditional it rides on two rails with a screw
that's hidden behind this stainless panel at the back or
well it's supposed to unfortunately our best guess is that the parts kit that
was stored inside the printer during shipping managed to crack one of the
bearing mounts in transit replacing it would have required an
almost complete disassembly and reassembly of the printer so instead we
pried back the sheet metal and epoxied the ever-loving bejesus out of it since
then it's held up fine thanks to the auto bed leveling grid but we do treat
it gingerly anyway just to be safe now since the version that we showed you in
our earlier footage cocopress has ditched the refrigerated airstream and
instead uses a patent-pending vapor compression refrigeration system to keep
the entire build chamber at just the right temperature and when i say just
the right temperature i mean exactly the difference between chocolate
flowing too quickly and it freezing inside the nozzle causing a jam is just
a few tenths of a degree celsius and the
thermal problem then is thus if you overheat the chocolate or heat it up too
fast you ruin the temper or the crystal structure within the chocolate and
that's really important because maintaining that is what gives chocolate
a nice surface finish and a crisp
snap when it's broken overheating can also cause the cocoa fats to separate
and create bloom or pockets of fat on the surface of the chocolate they're not
harmful but they're not exactly appetizing on the other hand if it's too
cold well
it's not gonna flow right and the same goes for the atmosphere
that it's being printed in too hot the chocolate won't solidify too cold and
it'll freeze as it's coming out the end of the nozzle now after our first few
test prints it was pretty clear that something wasn't working as intended and
after solving the aforementioned build platform issues we hit an even bigger
snag the compressor for the chamber refrigeration system is not working as
intended it caused temperature spikes that turn our prints into gooey messes
like this one it still tastes good but
it wasn't exactly the best way for us to show off the unit's capabilities so they
happily addressed it with a custom firmware that your working unit won't
need and finally we were off to the races or so we thought chocolate
printing is i can't mince words here really hard
so colin spent days fudging the temperature up and down a tenth of a
degree haha pun intended by the way then waiting half an hour for those changes
to propagate to the rest of the chocolate and then testing and retesting
and then we'd get a good print and then everything would go out the window again
and the road was long and delicious but
very frustrating both our milk and dark chocolate proved
to be unreliable due to the handicapped state of our cocoa press
white chocolate however can be printed at 18 to 20 degrees and
actually turned out pretty well but i'll let the results speak for themselves
this is pretty impressive yeah there's still some errors
but like little errors so this was done in vase mode so one of the problems we
had was the stepper driver for the z-axis was
skipping or adding some steps and you could see you know things got elongated
so by by just having it rise slowly in a spiral we kind of mitigated that and you
can see where there's feed issues where there's you know a pocket the chocolate
wasn't homogeneous and we ended up with little failures but the rest of the
print went pretty good pretty good and even in milk chocolate as long as we
didn't go too high like yeah as long as you stayed low that's a very
recognizable LTT logo that's freaking
cool although i do have to say colin some of these i'm not convinced that you
ever 3d printed at all it looks like all you ever did was turn a phallus into
another phallus you're not wrong it's not very transformative
yeah and so i have a couple samples here we can um so these are texture samples
so if you these are actually literally just infill from a 3d printing slicer
you just have zero top layers and you can generate infill for shapes
oh that's interesting and then you take one that's like
more completely filled the taste is so much stronger on the one
with less air pockets even though to like my monkey brain my mouth is just
full of chocolate in both cases and that's something you can't get any other
way right you can create these inner structures that you have different feels
and you're adding a new dimension to the to the chocolate to the food like the
white chocolate in general for me which isn't chocolate by the way white chocolate chocolate's a big scam uh
white chocolate is not my favorite it's way too sweet for me but what i found
was with the really big air pockets it's actually palatable it mellows out yeah i
mean i am more of a dark chocolate boy
these days those dick butts are dark chocolate and they came out okay
it was just a little difficult to extrude right because we can't get the
temperature low enough besides the frustration it was really
fun it still did manage some overhangs and stuff so this is just a matter of it
needs to be working properly yeah like look at the pillars like you're printing
in chocolate it's horrible but for what it is like we had an issue with the den
with that in mind like come on it's a chocolate freaking boat and now
for the question you've all been waiting for who makes tastier chips
Intel or AMD see that david they're intelligent chips
team blue not bad mmm tune red
i do like the taste of the core because it got what's of course
eat a dick but
it's surprisingly fast like obviously it's nothing like a filament printer
well i think the big thing to note is like the nozzle is 0.8 millimeters which
is double the size of what we have on the process so our layer height is like
half a millimeter so it prints really fast like each of the chips i think is
11 minutes just makes you salivate just watching it now as far as we know this
is the first coco press to make it out into the wild and
it's pretty clear that the team there does have some challenges to solve
particularly around shipping but aside from that one the build quality ease of
use and the design itself are freaking awesome i mean it's a 3d printer in a
fridge and while at the end of the day we weren't able to get reliable prints
that were taller than say a centimeter the bones are all here and they're
really good the extruder which is by far the hardest part is excellent and
reliable and the motion system is beautiful and works exactly as intended
now at ten thousand us dollars it won't be
making its way into the average maker's home lab anytime soon but once the
wrinkles are ironed out i could see cake makers or other confectioners making an
absolute killing with custom toppers
fancy chocolate bars and that sort of thing once the wrinkles are worked out
and they arrive in one piece speaking of working out wrinkles
work out the wrinkles in your privacy by adding a vpn that masks your ip and
encrypts traffic to and from your device private internet access has reliable
service and no bandwidth caps and they offer configurable encryption and an
internet kill switch to keep you in control of your connection when combined
with private browsing best practices a vpn like pia can even make websites
think that you're in a different country with pia you can connect up to 10
devices at once with clients for Windows macOS Android iOS and Linux and they
recently launched a dedicated ip option that has absolutely zero connection to
your account or who you are not even pia knows that the ip address belongs to you
and you just get a smoother experience with the same privacy and security that
you're used to so try pia risk free they've got servers in over 77 countries
and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee if for whatever reason you're not satisfied we're going to have them
linked below well that's it that's all we've got for you on this treat
of a printer if you're into this sort of makery kind of stuff get subscribed
you're in the process of building a tool-changing 3d printer in order to
build an entirely 3d printed computer case and you will not want to miss that
in the meantime go watch our review of the cheapest 3d printer