Pizza-Making CNC Machine Is The Only Tool We’ve Ever Dreamed Of

Making pizza is fun, but eating pizza is even better. Ideally, you’ll get to spend much more time doing the latter than the former. If you had a pizza-making CNC machine, that would help you achieve this goal, and thankfully, [Twarner] is working on that very technology.

The Pizza-Pizza CNC Machine is based on Marlin firmware running on a Mini RAMbo 3D printer motherboard, and is a 3-axis CNC machine. At a glance, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s some kind of fancy futuristic vinyl player, but it’s actually intended to cook a tasty delicious pie. It’s a gantry-based machine that uses two tool ends, one charged with distributing sauce, and the other cheese. It’s programmed with G-code to designate areas to coat with sauce and areas to cover with cheese. It can’t create dough from scratch sadly, but instead operates using pre-manufactured pizza bases.

The current level of sophistication is low, and there are issues with cheese clogs and the general messiness of the operation. However, this doesn’t mean there’s no value in automated pizza manufacture. If anything, we want to see the more open-sauce development in this area until we end up with a pizza factory on every kitchen bench worldwide. We’ve already seen that hackers have mastered how to build a good pizza oven, so now we just need to solve this part of the equation. Video after the break.

 

20 thoughts on “Pizza-Making CNC Machine Is The Only Tool We’ve Ever Dreamed Of

  1. This looks like a process development problem as much as a material handling one. Is it easier to handle preprocessed loose ingredients, or should they be processed from their block bulk state to the loose topping at the tool head?

    A peristaltic pump could handle dense or chunky sauces without having to worry about pump cleanout afterwards. A manifold to handle a flush cycle might work to allow switching between sauces. It might also be easier to move around a hose and nozzle instead of a sauce hopper.

    Would building a cheese grating tool head be more efficient than trying to move bulky pre grated cheese? That way the machine only has to run a grater head against a solid block of parmesan or mozzarella instead of trying to move squishy/spongy sort of wet cheese.

    He could use something similar for peperoni and other bulk meats. A rotary knife cutting slices off a peperoni stick being pushed by a linear stepper.

    Bulkier toppings are the trickier part, but there are similar industrial solutions that could be down sized and 3D printed. The lazy part of me just wants to use a pick and place delta bot, but I think it would be more elegant to use the gantry and tool head picker. A conveyor belt along the top of the gantry with a row of robot fingers on the side to flick toppings off at the appropriate moment could work. Similar to how they sort apples at high speed. Likely easier to just use chopped ingredients and a wet-bulk handler solution.

    I want to over design this and at the same time keep it as simply clean as possible.

    1. “instead of trying to move squishy/spongy sort of wet cheese.”

      I believe that “wet cheese” was slang for “cottage cheese” (curds and whey)
      Not criticizing your choices of words.

      1. The first thought that comes to mind is a linear actuator driven piston feeding a auger at the opposite end. The auger rotates past a port to deposit meat at a specific rate. If we could calibrate a meatball maker to produce .25″ or 6mm meatballs that might make placement easier.

        I’m putting way too much thought into this…

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