Toast-Bot Butters For You (Sometimes)

Sometimes — despite impracticality, safety, failure, and general good sense — one has an urge to see a project through for the sake of it. When you’re sick of buttering your toast every morning, you might take a leaf out of Rick Sandc– ahem, [William Osman]’s book and build a toast-bot to take care of the task for you.

[Osman] — opting for nail the overkill quotient — is using a reciprocating saw motor to hold the butter while the toast moves underneath the apparatus on a platform controlled by a linear stepper motor. The frame and mounts for Toast-Bot were cut out of wood on his home-built laser cutter — affectionately named Retina Smelter 9000′ — and assembled after some frustration and application of zip-ties. The final result DOES butter toast, but — well — see for yourself.

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Is Robot Butter Better Butter?

Humans have been making butter for thousands of years. If you have a cooperative cow or sheep and a means to agitate her milk, butter is not far behind. So why would you employ a $15,000 industrial robot to make butter? Because – robot butter!

Actually, Robutter is a design experiment by [Stephan], [Philipp], and [Jonas] to explore where craft ends and industrial processes begin, and to see how automation adds or removes values from traditional products. It’s a fair question, given that butter can be churned with everything from animal skins to massive continuous churns. So the team programmed [DIRK], a Fanuc LR Mate 200ic which is normally more at home on an assembly line, to carefully agitate a container of cream. After a bit of fiddling they found the optimal position and movements to produce a delicate butter that looks pretty tasty. The video after the break shows the process and the results, but sadly there’s no taste test of the Robutter against grocery store butter.

It may come as a surprise that Hackaday appears never to have featured a butter making project before. Sure, we’ve got a lot of food hacks, most of which seem to involve beer or coffee. But we did run across a recent article on a buttermilk pancake-making robot that you might like to check out.

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