Sandwich Robot Keeps You Fed So You Can Keep Hacking

Food. A necessary — often delicious — interruption of whatever project you’re currently hacking away at. Ordering takeout gets expensive and it’s generally unhealthy to subsist solely on pizza. With the Sandwich-O-Matic, a simple voice command fulfills this biological need with minimal disturbance of your build time.

Built for a thirty-six hour hackathon, the Sandwich-O-Matic is controlled by a Photon and an Arduino. The backend is running node, hosted on AWS, and Google Cloud was used for voice to text recognition. This thing is a fully automated and voice controlled sandwich building station. A DC motor services the toaster, while the rest of the device is actuated by servos. Simply tap the ‘begin recording’ button on the site, tell it your ingredient choices, and off it goes.

Despite some challenges with I2C and rebuilding their dispenser design, they managed to finish the build ahead of schedule. A future version will include more topping options, condiment choices, and a more streamlined voice-to-sandwich process.

If, however, you prefer to play with your food, then by all means turn it into an RC car.

[Thanks for the tip, Nils Hitze!]

16 thoughts on “Sandwich Robot Keeps You Fed So You Can Keep Hacking

  1. This reminds me of a project I once saw where someone made an automatic hot dog maker (Preparer?). You had to load a hot dog manually but from there the machine would take over. It would insert two electrodes into the dog and cook it with mains voltage, then deposit said crispy dog into a bun. Your condiments of choice would then be added via compressed air powered dispensers. The first run used a little too much pressure in the dispensers and ketchup was EVERYWHERE. Food machines are always fun.

  2. Amusing rube goldberg device. Not practical in the least. Imagine feeding some geek a sandwich where the mayo and chicken has been sitting out at room temperature – the geek gets a trip to the ER.

  3. ll she needs is some insulation and a few peltier devices. It’s a prototype! Give it a break! They’ll have used all the food/condiments up by the time they get one good sammich!

  4. Hi, I’m Clive, one of the creators of this project! To respond to the article and comments…

    xkcd wasn’t actually our inspiration! Alex just really wanted to make a toaster hack for some reason, and so we ended up coming up with a sandwich-maker. No, we never actually ate any of the results, even though we wiped everything down with alcohol and had saran wrap on hand. We’d probably have to put refrigeration coils around the whole spinning dispenser unit.

    One fun fact – if you look closely, you can see that the toaster is epoxied to a door hinge. The door hinge is in turn hand-screwed to a piece of Ikea shelf.

    You might also enjoy the voice recognition demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15bLO5PqAOE
    And maybe even star us on GitHub! https://github.com/toastify/toastserv ;)

    Finally, the sad epilogue: due to space constraints on the bus, we had to leave Sandwich-O-Matic behind at Trent, after salvaging away the components. But it shall live on forever in our hearts, souls, and stomachs.

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