The Katjes Magic Candy Factory (designed by Printrbot) just won “most innovative product” at the international sweets show in Germany. Pretty cool. It 3D prints gummy candy hot and it cools and is ready to eat in a couple minutes. It’s all natural vegan gummy candy- frivolous and fun.
Design grew out of our work on the paste extruder. Katjes has been a great partner- very cool company. When we visited the factory in Germany, they announced they just bought Vicks (boiled candy, essentially). Their factory is super-automated and a wonder of efficiency… Incredibly green, btw. The highlight was driving the CEOs Tesla E85D at 119mph on the autobahn 
We have iterated through several major design revs- the most recent in the pictures focused on beefing up the mechanics and designing for manufacturing. The printers will be in high end candy shops around the world in the coming months. We are preparing for CE certification and such.
It’s a beautiful machine… We have learned a lot building this gem. It’s a non-final beta so there will be changes, but we are getting close. The wood will be matte clear coated in the final… This just has a light spray of photograph-uv-protecting clear coat. The wood is decorative, matching their branding, the rest is powder coated aluminum and steel. The betas were 100% made in-house at Printrbot. Our local craftsmen-vendors will do the metal and machining for the production models.
It runs off a printrboard (24v this time) and a Windows 10 tablet. They have a custom back-end slicing and converting svg logos and such that supplies the stls. At trade shows and the flagship candy store in London, it’s all the rage.
Tackling the unique requirements was a huge challenge and involved all the great minds I get to work w here and at Katjes.
I love a challenge!
Brook
Very cool. I love the attention to detail, that key latch is great. Great work @Printrbot team.
Congrats @Brook_Drumm on a nice design and the functional use! I can only imagine driving that Tesla was… Sweet. 
@Brook_Drumm is like a real world James Bond’s Q…you never know what his team is working on, and I wouldn’t be half surprised if there weren’t Ninjas training in the next room over. (With backpack mounted printers fabbing shiuriken on the fly)
R&d are at the heart of Printrbot… Fast and nimble is good for a scrappy company.
The only things left that people haven’t seen and are semi-top secret are:
Esp powered tank remote control via cell phone
Esp powered skateboard control via cell phone
Experimentation and extensive work on future releases of our 3D printers / cncs… Said too much about these things already 
Pellet extruder work for Big-E (drawings only)
Multi-color/material extruder (drawings only)
Simple w stupid long X axis (a kit? Doubt it. Files? Sure)
Plus overkill w stupid long Y axis (a kit? Doubt it. Files? Sure.)
Embroidery machine… This one has been a very long wait as we get agreements in order w the software creator / collaborator to open source everything but pay him as appreciation of his work - only a small run of these planned.
Bot farm work… Mounts (trial run done), software in brainstorm mode.
Now all the cats are out of the bag. I don’t like secrets, but some are legally bound and others are good practice for business. I can blab all I want about fun side projects in PB Labs.
Brook
Congratulations on the design win Brook. Is this your first contracted design?
Thanks. Well, not really. We don’t contract design, We design stuff we are going to sell. In these cases, the customer is a company… They can mark it up how they want and create value added services or products. But we never forsake our brand… Our name is printed on every one.
We built the Bocusini food printer (Simple with our paste extruder. It was a Kickstarter.
We build the magic candy factory.
We are entertaining other avenues… Specifically, 3D printer related hardware.
Oh, and we are exploring producing electronics for certain projects to use some available down time on our nice pick and place line.
If you have available time on the pcb line, build me a couple TeensyluV1 boards, lol.
I’m impressed with how many projects you take on at once, I know that mind of yours is always looking to build something new or improve something. And now you have all the tools and resources to make whatever you want.
<- is totally jealous.
Hoho what a beauty! It looks like a Printrbot Play and Ultimaker Original crossover! Is that how future Printrbots will look like? With wifi abilities and extruder sensors and tons of nergasms on the way?
Pretty cool Brook! Congratz on the win!
We are kicking around a pro machine with all the trimmings. Dual. My designs try to be as clean and minimalistic as possible, do whatever I do, I’ll go for clean lines.
This printer has an usual “everything up top” design but just cause I can. It’s pretty low resolution when printing gummy candy and even though it’s slow, it prints a small model in 5 minutes. so rigidity in the z wasn’t an issue. The xz stage is very heavy.
Doing this on a plastic 3D printer may not work. We will be shooting for rigidity and speed if we do the pro.
