[52 Skillz] didn’t know anything about building robots. So he decided to not just read about it or make a simple robot. He jumped right in and wanted to build a robot that could make a cake. It took about a year and a half but it now — mostly — works, as you can see in the video below.
Granted it isn’t perfect and it isn’t really all that practical. But as a learning exercise, it was certainly ambitious and successful. Apparently, you still have to scrape the bowl a little by hand to get some of the flour off the bowl walls. Also, loading the ingredients might be more work than just making it by hand, but that really isn’t the point.
As far as we can tell, there aren’t any specific plans provided to duplicate the robot. But we didn’t think that was such a bad thing. You wouldn’t be making one to actually produce cake. And if you just copy the existing design, you’ll miss out on the process of learning, which is described in detail in the video. If you do want to go down the same path, be warned that [52 Skillz] estimates he put in about 300 hours of effort.
However, it is fun to watch all the mechanisms employed to do the work. It is almost like a Rube Goldberg machine, but a little higher tech.
If we had a cake bot, we think it would only be fair to add electronics to the finished products. Then again, you could skip the cake and go to full virtual reality. Well. Perhaps not full, but certainly low calorie.
I sort of did something similar, a real hacking project. I called it ‘get a wife who can make a cake’ :-)
$ make me a cakeBugger off!
$ sudo make me a cake
Okay, darling
reminds me of how disappointed i was as a kid when my mom said she was going to get a kitchen robot and i saw what it actually was .. (was in the late 80s to early 90s i guess). I was inconsolable for days.
Low Calorie Reality sounds like a band name.
Less Filling, for those lower dimensions.
Now he needs to have the robot decorate it.
He should have used a PI to run his Cakebot…
Shuld have filmed himself wearing a fat suit, blame “failure cakes”. :-D
Bread machines are robots. Is cake inherently more difficult than bread? I would think a cupcake machine would sell very well.
I think the problem with this is that he made a robot that makes a cake the way a person would make a cake. But if you look at bread making machines, they don’t do it the way a person would. Similarly, a different approach to a cake machine might produce something marketable (imagine how popular a cupcake machine would be).
Is it reasonable to call this a robot? I would happily call it a cake making machine, but it is not a robot. Good start.
Awesome vid.
Thanks for the share.