We'll be there showing off (amongst other things) our the brand new design for the CandyFab 5000, the next-generation CandyFab hardware reference platform. Great things are coming for The CandyFab Project in the next few months. We will have new tutorials, documentation, designs, a development roadmap and more to show off, all of which we'll be writing much more about this summer. Find us at Maker Faire in the south hall, past the Tesla coils.

We'll sure hope to see you there. Advance tickets are on sale at a discount through Friday April 25.

The basic idea of Heater 2.0 is that we take a ceramic heating element from a soldering iron and wrap fine refrigeration tubing around it. One of the shortcomings of that design is that the thermal transfer between the ceramic and the air was very inefficient, due to several different factors. The net result is that the heater ran unpleasantly hot while the air was not hot as we would like. The natural way of compensating for lower temperature is to turn up the airflow, of course, which does lead to degradation in resolution.

Here are the first results with Heater 2.1, an improvement on same basic design. Instead of a ceramic heater, it is now based on a low cost and highly robust cartridge heater, which can be obtained new for as little as $15. We have used this design to print some high-resolution objects, such as the trefoil knot shown above, finally approaching a true 20 DPI resolution, and easily the cleanest output yet achieved with the CandyFab.

So, welcome Make Magazine readers!

And, CandyFabbers-- now you have something to show everyone so that they won't think you're (quite as) crazy.

CandyFab Output + Ugly stick = ?

As noted on the list of questions and recently brought up again in the forums, it had been suggested at some point that it might be possible to smooth the rough edges of lower-resolution CandyFab sugar output by annealing it in the oven. The idea being that you heat it to the point that the structure softens enough to relieve stresses but does not yet deform-- slightly under the melting point. This is potentially a good method to avoid cracking. As a secondary effect, it is conceivable that the loosely attached material on the outside (the white fuzz) would preferentially melt, leaving an improved and (maybe) smoothed object, something like flame polishing. Well, that's the idea anyway.

In a household oven, this is a real challenge. As read with our (very good) pyrex thermometer, the oven temperature swings by as much 50 degrees when it's "at temperature." Yikes. So, we put a few of our objects to be destroyed, er, mini-docecahedrons on parchment paper, and into the oven they went. Actually, we cooked them one at atime. We put the cookie sheet in a cold oven and slowly raised the temperature, taking them out after half an hour. We took the temperature close to, but not reaching, 20 degrees below the melting point of sugar. And, as you can see in the picture of the two above, the effect was reproducibly less than stellar.

The loosely attached sugar on the outside of the models did melt, and flowed down the objects to form a puddle at the bottom. (The one on the right has been turned so that you can see the what the bottom puddle looks like.) Other than that, we observe (1) it did not result in a smooth finish (2) it resulted in additional caramelization/discoloring-- suggesting that the temperature was not as indicated-- perhaps just due to nonuniform temperature in the oven and (3) that the lower halves of the models look smaller than the upper halves, so there actually was bulk deformation occurring... meaning that we may not have even been in the annealing regime.

Conclusion? It's not obviously possible to achieve useful annealing under these conditions-- or possibly at all in a standard home oven. We may try again at a lower yet temperature. But, looks like this is one thing that we can add to the list of good ideas that just didn't work out.

Cnet repoter Daniel Terdiman writes about the meeting in an article, "Fabricators descend on Maker Faire Austin" :

We have recently succeeded in fabricating durable thermoplastic objects on the CandyFab. That means that we can produce strong, waterproof-- even dishwasher safe(!) -- forms. What's the downside? It smells like melted plastic when you print, not like melted sugar.

Read on for more about the materials, shapes and process that we used.

We could use your help expanding this section of our web site and helping to make it more useful. It would be great to have a directory of relevant industrial and surplus sources, commercial and open-source fabrication projects and resources, 3D model libraries, drawing programs and conversion utilities, and other resources of use to the potential CandyFabber.

Here is how to add a link. First go to the links section and click where it says "[ Add A Link ]".

As an example, I'm going to add a link to McMaster-Carr. In the form, I enter "McMaster-Carr" as the title (no quotation marks). Under link, I put the appropriate URL ( http://www.mcmaster.com/ ). For category, I first take a look at the the pop-up list of existing categories. Nothing seems appropriate, so I want to add a new link category. To add the new category, select "Other" in the pop-up for the category and enter the new category name in the text field to the right. In this case, I'm making a new category called "Industrial Supplies". After adding a short description of the link, click Submit.

The links section is moderated-- we're not here to provide advertising space for pharmaceuticals and online casinos, ya know-- but good links will be approved in a jiffy and show up in the links section.

Thanks for helping to make CandyFab.org a better place!

One thing that we have not brought up is the large number of DIY approaches to making hot air for use in surface mount soldering. Most of these designs are based on either recycled found parts or repurposed soldering irons, so they may be of limited use for our purposes-- particularly if food safety is an issue. However, they are still worth a look. So, here is a brief roundup of hot-air rework and soldering machines that you can make at home.

• This new version uses a recycled heating element in a ceramic tube.
• Chris Harper wrote instructions for the first (in our list) of several versions based on adding an aquarium pump to a soldering iron. Also, there is an alternate writeup about that version.
• Here is a similar build from Engadget
• This version from Gideontech may have inspired the previous two designs.
• This model from Dan's Workshop may be the most useful of these designs for CandyFab. The heating element is hand wound from stainless steel MIG welding wire-- Nice!

If you're either new to the CandyFab project or wondering what the status of the project is, these slides might be worth a look.