Remember when we watched Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time and a crewman walked up to the replicator and he was all, “Give me a Denubian slime pudding and a Tang!” and the replicator was all, “brrrm” and it beamed the food onto a plate and everyone watching the show was all, like, “woah!” and we knew, in our hearts, that someday it would be us ordering that pudding and watching it materialize. That day is now.
Sorta.
What we have now is CandyFab, a 3D printer that outputs in granulated sugar that was introduced last May by gotta-bookmark-it Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and subsequently spun off as its own project. Since its debut in May, CandyFab has gone from 5 ppi to 20 ppi (as demonstrated in the small photo to the right) and can actually produce edible content! Right now, they’re working on a new heater to stick the sugar together.
An open source project, CandyFab is looking for volunteers to help bring the technology forward.
Photos: Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com
