Automate Your Comfort Food Prep With An IoT Grilled Cheese Robot

January 28, 2019 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

What exactly qualifies as comfort food is very much in the palate of the comfortee. Grilled cheese may not work for everyone under every circumstance, but we’ll risk a bet that the gooey delicacy is pretty close to universal, especially when you’re under the weather.

But if you’re too sick to grill up your own and don’t have anyone to do it for you, this grilled cheese sandwich-making robot might be the perfect kitchen accessory. Dubbed “The Cheeseborg” and built as a semester project by [Taylor Tabb], [Mitchell Riek], and [Evan Hill] at Carnegie-Mellon University, the bot takes a few shortcuts that might rankle the grilled cheese purist. Chief among these is the use of a sandwich press rather than a plain griddle. We understand that this greatly simplifies the flipping problem, but to us the flipping, especially the final high arcing double backflip onto the sandwich plate, is all part of the experience. Yes, a fair number of sandwiches end up going to the dog that way, but that’s beside the point.

As realized, Cheeseborg feeds bread and cheese from stacks using a vacuum arm, sprays the grill with butter, and uses a motorized arm to push the uncooked sandwich into the press. At the peak of grilled perfection, the press opens and ejects the sandwich to a waiting plate. As an added bonus, the whole thing is Google Assistant enabled so you can beseech Cheeseborg to fix you a sandwich from your sick bed. See it in action below.

This is far from the first culinary robot to grace our pages. There was the recent CNC sausage bot, we’ve seen plenty of pancake bots, and even [Ben Krasnow] once automated cookie making.

Continue reading “Automate Your Comfort Food Prep With An IoT Grilled Cheese Robot” →

Sudo Make Me A Sandwich

March 30, 2017 by Anool Mahidharia 29 Comments

How do you like your Ham and Cheese sandwich? If you answered “I prefer it beefy”, look no further than [William Osman]’s Vin Diesel Ham and Cheese Sandwich! [Osman]’s blog tagline is “There’s science to do” but he is the first to admit this is science gone too far. When one of his followers, [Restroom Sounds], commented “Please sculpt a bust of [Vin Diesel] using laser cut cross-sections of laser sliced ham”, he just had to do it.

His friend [CameraManJohn] modeled the bust using Maya and [Osman] has provided links to download the files in case there’s the remote possibility that someone else wants to try this out. They picked the cheapest packs of sliced ham they could get from the supermarket — so technically, they did not actually laser slice the ham. For help with generating the slice outlines, they found the Slicer app for Autodesk’s Fusion 360 which did exactly what needed to be done. The app converts the 3D model into individual cross sections, similar to an MRI. It helps to measure the thickness of various samples of your raw material so that the Slicer output is not too stretched (or squished). The result is a set of numbered 2D drawings that can be sent to your laser cutter.

The rest of the video scores pretty high on the gross-o-meter, as [Osman] goes about laser cutting slices of ham (and a few slices of cheese), tasting laser cut ham (for Science, of course), and trying to prevent his computer from getting messed up. In the end, the sandwich actually turns out looking quite nice, although we will not comment on its taste. A pair of googly eyes adds character to the bust.

One problem is that the Slicer app does not optimise its results for efficient packing. with the smallest part occupying the same bounding box as the largest. This leads to a lot of wasted pieces of ham slices to be thrown away. [Bill] is still wondering what to do with his awesome sandwich, so if you have suggestions, chime in with your comments after you’ve seen the video linked below. If you know [Vin Diesel], let him know.

This isn’t [Osman]’s first adventure with crazy food hacks — here are a few tasty examples: a Toast-Bot that Butters For You (sometimes), a Laser-Cut Gingerbread Trailer Home, and a Pumpkin-Skinned BattleBot.

Continue reading “Sudo Make Me A Sandwich” →

Sandwich Robot Keeps You Fed So You Can Keep Hacking

November 27, 2016 by James Hobson 16 Comments

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.

Continue reading “Sandwich Robot Keeps You Fed So You Can Keep Hacking” →

Bistrobot: Make Me A Sandwich

April 8, 2016 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

Reading this article in the San Francisco Chronicle sounds very familiar if you’ve owned a hand-built robot of any kind. “Bistrobot” is a pretty sweet sandwich-making robot. It toasts bread on the fly and applies peanut butter, jelly, honey, apple butter, and/or a few other gloopy dispensable delicacies at the behest of human customers. Watch the video below and we guarantee that you’ll want to toss a couple bucks into it, even if you don’t like toasted PB&J sandwiches.

The video makes everything look peachy, like a 3D printer on a good day. Check out the jelly nozzle zig-zagging across the half-sandwich — it’s very familiar. Indeed the whole machine seems like something we could build. But as we all know, continuous duty has a way of finding the flaws in our designs. The Chronicle article is part triumph, and part tale of woe, with the builder being called in to repair the Bistrobot for the “zillionth” time.

Continue reading “Bistrobot: Make Me A Sandwich” →