3D printing an Oreo (excuse me, "Chocolate Sandwich Creme")
Well, that doesn’t really require a whole lot of explanation does it? I was looking for another challenge to see if I could really defeat the Carbon X1’s capabilities (part 1 of that exercise here) and I decided to take a stab at 3D printing the off-brand Oreos that had been sitting in the cabinet since Thanksgiving. I will never eat them anyway, so they became a thing I was going to study to draw in CAD.
my lovely rendering of a 365-brand double chocolate filled creme in CAD, minus the numeric text, which i actually nailed and then realized was mirrored the wrong way and it was too late at night on a sunday to try and fix
The Oreo seemed like a suitable challenge for the printer because of the way both sides of the cookie sandwich have the semi-sophisticated pattern with the notches. 3D printers tend to struggle in general with anything that isn’t fully printed directly onto the plate, and I wanted to see if the Carbon X1 still had that same limitation as other printers or if it had some kind of LIDAR-enabled way around that.
First I printed the cookie out in 3 separate pieces. That was easy enough, though they came out too small. But what I really wanted to do was just stack the whole thing into one solid brick of cookie, and see if the printer could print all 3 layers in the correct colors without a lot of fuss. So I made some adjustments in CAD and made a go at that.
The results were kind of a mixed bag, tbh. It definitely printed and it was satisfying to just drag the paintbrush in the Bambu software suite and paint the middle of the cookies with all kinds of gross fillings and print out a bunch of Oreos. But the backs of the cookies are still really ugly from whatever it had to do in the slicer to stick the cookies onto the print bed as one piece. That’s still a big limit.
the bottom of one of the 3D printed oreos
Dimensioning the cookies accurately was also more challenging than I expected. Most of the cookies pictured below on the plate are printed at 200% scale of the CAD drawing. That leaves the cookie pieces too thick, but when I tried thinner pieces the slicing software threw a tantrum because of the overhangs where the frosting on a realistic Oreo design is just slightly narrower in diameter than the cookie pieces. So it almost has to be the big hockey puck-like design to print as one piece.
I could, of course, add some kind of notches or slots and 3D print really nice looking cookies as multiple pieces, even just as one layout on the tray, but that wasn’t really the point of this exercise. I wanted to just 3D print an Oreo in one solid piece, dammit.
Mission: mostly accomplished.
bone apple tea, om nom nom, etc.
