Chocolate Drone - Collaboration with Chocolove
Back in early 2018, a good friend of mine approached me with a strange concept: building drones out of chocolate. I said sure, and soon we were in our university's maker-space, with fingers covered in chocolate, working away at different sculpting methods. Soon we were joined by a third friend, and the three of us built away, developing prototypes, and eating the scraps of those that didn't work. Yet what started as a silly way to pass some time soon turned to be much more of an engineering challenge than we had expected.
Chocolate, as it turns out, is just about the worst material you could use in aerospace. It's brittle, it's heavy, and melted chocolate does not get along with electronics either. Overcoming these obstacles proved to be an endeavor that took dozens of prototypes, each an attempt at applying engineering theory to a problem that really did not need solving. And yet the frustration of seeing our drones crash and break kept us going, and soon we had come up with a method that produced reliably flying chocolate: A complex form is designed in CAD and 3D printed with even perforations, then sprayed with food safe coating and dipped in multiple thin layers of chocolate, in-between each of which the chocolate gets fiber-reinforced with sweet vermicelli strands, then cooled for 2 hours and separated from the plastic by breaking away the perforations.
About half-way through the development of our drones, we started a collaboration with Chocolove to produce promotional content for the chocolate manufacturer. They shared our excitement in the project, contributed suggestions, and supplied us with lots and lots of chocolate. A videographer also began documenting our project and helped us produce a video describing our process and final product. The video was shared around on social media by Duke University, Chocolove, various engineering blogs and other pages, and collected over 65,000 views.
This project was especially valuable in my development of prototyping and creative problem solving skills. Trying to put everything together required a lot of trial and error, but also lots of thinking outside the box.
Chocolate, as it turns out, is just about the worst material you could use in aerospace. It's brittle, it's heavy, and melted chocolate does not get along with electronics either. Overcoming these obstacles proved to be an endeavor that took dozens of prototypes, each an attempt at applying engineering theory to a problem that really did not need solving. And yet the frustration of seeing our drones crash and break kept us going, and soon we had come up with a method that produced reliably flying chocolate: A complex form is designed in CAD and 3D printed with even perforations, then sprayed with food safe coating and dipped in multiple thin layers of chocolate, in-between each of which the chocolate gets fiber-reinforced with sweet vermicelli strands, then cooled for 2 hours and separated from the plastic by breaking away the perforations.
About half-way through the development of our drones, we started a collaboration with Chocolove to produce promotional content for the chocolate manufacturer. They shared our excitement in the project, contributed suggestions, and supplied us with lots and lots of chocolate. A videographer also began documenting our project and helped us produce a video describing our process and final product. The video was shared around on social media by Duke University, Chocolove, various engineering blogs and other pages, and collected over 65,000 views.
This project was especially valuable in my development of prototyping and creative problem solving skills. Trying to put everything together required a lot of trial and error, but also lots of thinking outside the box.
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