A Food 3d printer and Why it's an Insult to 3d Printing

All Images courtesy of "Kickstarter"

There is a new 3d printer called the Foodini.  In summary it is printer that prepares food, it has reload -able food cartridges with the ingredients for what you want to make.  It contains five cartridges, that are around 4 ounces each.  It is used to prep food, then you have to take it out and cook it on your own. It only used whole ingredients that you put in yourself.

Design
Let me start by saying this thing is beautiful, I would love to see some normal 3d printers look like this.  It kind of looks like a microwave that was designed by apple.  All the components are hidden as they should be with a supposedly consumer 3d printer.  It has a 7 inch full color touch screen and is covered in stainless steel.  It would look really beautiful sitting on any kitchen countertop especially in a modern style house.

Functionality (Please Imagine Me Reading this in my Annoyed Voice)

Pizza Making

Let me start by saying that I really like the idea of a food 3d printer, that would allow you to make nearly anything by just placing in some cartridges.  The Foodini fails in many ways for this dream.  To start, you are incredibly limited in what you can make.  The most novel thing that it can make is pizza, and it can't even fully make the pizza.  To make it, it layers down the dough on the unheated build platform, then it adds a layer of sauce, the next logical step would be that it heats up the build chamber and begins adding a layer of cheese.

An example of Layered puke

 However, the next logical step is not what happens, the next step is to take the dough and sauce out of the Foodini, put on the cheese yourself, then put it in the oven.  Also some of the stuff it produces looks like layered puke. This leaves me really curious why someone would by a Foodini, you can easily make the dough into a circle and layer sauce yourself, especially when you have already spent the time to mix all the ingredients to make the dough and sauce.  It can print some cool chocolate pieces, but I think that the novelty of chocolate forming simple objects would ware off and is not worth $1000.



How I Would Make it Better
It has become an odd habit of mine to make things better in my mind the instant I read or hear about them. My first though, was that it needs to be able to complete a simple pizza without human intervention it seems silly, and to be blunt, stupid that a human must intervene and finish it.  It needs to be able to cook the food to do this a heated build chamber and heated build plate must be used. Also, it doesn't need a 7 inch touch screen which is really just a money drain.

On the Filastuder side of things, I am really close to getting it fully working, my attempt using the flexible coupling failed, I had not realized at the time of purchase that it was fully cut down in a spiral to give it flex.  The force needed to spin the drillbit was to great.  I am now getting a fully solid version of it, but it won't be here till next week.  I'll keep you updated on how the new coupler works.