 So what did 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 Cocoa 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. I'm gonna 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 Cocoa Press because with this, success is not a big deal. And it's not a big deal. It's a big deal. And it's a big deal. And it's a big deal. And it's a big deal. And it's a big deal. And it's a big deal. And it's a big deal. And it's a big deal. 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 Cocoa 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 gotta 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. Pfft. Ha ha ha. The creator of the Cocoa 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 subambient 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 Cocoa 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 material scientists and maker nerds, he eventually created what stands before us today. Version four-ish. Now, Colin's been hands-on with the Cocoa 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 sh**, 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-sized SD card into the right up here with your print files. And if we open up the double pane glass door, we, wait, who put this stuff in here? LTTstore.com, right. Inside, 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. Core XY 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. 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 hackily 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, ha ha, 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 just having it rise slowly in a spiral, we kind of mitigated that. 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, 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 have different feels and you're adding a new dimension to the chocolate, to the food. Like the white chocolate in general for me, which isn't chocolate by the way, white chocolate's a big scam. 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. They did. It was just a little difficult to extrude. Right, cause 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. But we had an issue with the Z axis. With that in mind, like come on. It's a chocolate fricking boat. And now for the question you've all been waiting for. Who makes tastier chips, Intel or AMD? See that David? They're Intel and AMD chips. Team blue, not bad. Team red. I do like the taste of the core. Cause it out wants it of course. Linus, eat a dick butt. 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's 0.8 millimeters, which is double the size of what we have on the Prusas. So our layer height is like half a millimeter. Right. 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 10,000 US dollars, it won't be making its way into the average makers 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. 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We're gonna have the links below. Well, that's it. That's all we've got for you on this treat. Ha ha of a printer. If you're into this sort of make-ery kind of stuff, get subscribed. We'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 wanna miss that. In the meantime, go watch our review of the cheapest 3D printer.