In case you didn’t know it, pancake art is a thing. People are turning out incredible edible artwork using squeeze bottles and pancake batter. But even if you’re not terribly artistic, you can still amaze your breakfast buddies with this robotic pancake printer.
At its simplest – and in our opinion its most impressive – pancake art involves making patterns with thin batter on a hot griddle. The longer the batter is cooked, the darker it becomes, and art happens. To capitalize on this, [Trent], [Kevin], [Sunny] and [Isaac] built a 2-axis gantry with a working area the size of an electric griddle. A bottle is pressurized with a small air pump and controlled by a solenoid valve to serve as a batter extruder, and an Arduino controls everything. Custom pancake design software lets you plan your next masterpiece before committing it to batter.
Sadly, the video below shows us that the team didn’t include an automatic flipper for the pancake, but no matter – that’ll make a great feature for the next version. Maybe something like this?
There was a Kickstarter for one of these https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1853707494/pancakebot-the-worlds-first-pancake-printer in April of 2015. They are in the manufacturing cycle, I expect to have mine in a few weeks. It has an option for multiple bottles, so you can swap plain batter for strawberry (red) or blueberry (blue), so you can have multiple colors.
It’s pretty cool design, the gantry part lifts off of the griddle for cleaning. You can also use the griddle as a stand alone device to cook other items. As Alton Brown says, “don’t buy a uni-tasker appliance!”
I’m planning on also using it to decorate cakes, just pull the griddle out and put the cake in there. I’ll need to work on an icing that will flow evenly. (sorry for the second post, looks like I can’t edit prior posts)
Thinking the same thing here when mine arrives. My wife is a cake decorator so I’m hoping to show her up lol. Then of course I’ll give it to her so she can use it for cupcakes, cookies etc…
On the icing, from what I’ve seen (when she’s making cookies) it isn’t too hard to achieve flood fill consistency, and it looks (visually) like it’s the right viscosity to work with PancakeBot. When it arrives I’m looking forward to doing some delicious testing.
Oh and just an addition, I’m also planning on adding a low profile turntable below it that is able to pivot slightly, so that the cake can be rotated and decorated at a few different angles for the sides etc.
Technically, it’s really cool. No fault there.
But for a few years now, I’ve always made pancakes from scratch (even if I do still resort to cake mix). A good pancake has plenty of aeration. I figure loading the batter in an extruder, then squeezing it through a small orifice, would almost certainly wreck that aeration.
Life’s too short to eat crappy pancakes, even if they’re artistic. The machine still has uses though. I like [Astro Jetson]’s application better.