Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “PancakeBot: Holy Cow, It Worked – Miguel Valenzuela”.
Good morning, everybody it’s morning time, every time with pancakebot how many of you like lego, how many of you like robots and how many of you like pancakes? Okay, then you’re, you already love pancake bot. My name is miguel valenzuela and i’m the creator of pancakebot. Originally i’m from san diego california, i currently live in norway and i graduated from cal poly san luis obispo, with an agricultural engineering degree i’m married to my wife, rooney steen, and i have two daughters, lily and maya, and i work as a design engineer. Pancake pot started off as a whimsical dream to make a pancake machine out of lego for my two daughters, lily and maya it all started when i was reading make magazine volume 2 and my daughter asked me what i was doing and i said i’m reading an Article about a guy named adrian marshall, who’s, making a pancake machine or pancake stamping machine out of legos. She turned to her sister and said papa’s going to build a pancake machine out of lego next thing. You know i’m building a pancake machine out of lego and when a three-year-old tells you to make a pancake machine at a lego, you better deliver now. Making pancakes with lego was very tough. It’S an interesting challenge: lego’s, not food, safe. First of all, they actually do not endorse projects that involve food. Did you know that i only had one nxt controller and the cnc part was a little bit easy, but dispensing the batter was difficult.
So we tested out different, looks here so the first one right here, we’re testing it out with water notice, the long tube that we were testing it out with water behaves differently than batter. Now we had a batter dispenser unit. The batter dispenser unit, also known as two ketchup bottles cut in half it uses compressed air in a vacuum to work with lego pneumatics.
It uses a flexible switch and is controlled with motor and that flexible switch took me six weeks to develop. So here’s the batter dispenser unit and you’re going to see how it migrated on top of onto the bat onto the pancake bot. There’S a pancake bar right there with the batter dispenser unit on top and then there’s the flexible switch.
It works by rotating two different directions: counterclockwise, it pumps air into the tank counterclockwise it pumps the other way. Now this was a prototype for something bigger and then, of course, we wanted to figure out how to draw mickey mouse pancakes. That was the ultimate goal.
So eventually it took six months of trial and error, nine different designs and layouts, 10 gallons of pancake batter. We tried pink using python nxt. We also ended up using the lego, nxg software and i posted a video on youtube that went viral, and i want to share that with you really quick. If i can get the video to work, do we have sound there make some pancakes right here now. This is the first prototype and if you can look at the back, we have a stack of pancakes. We failed so many times.
Cal poly called me back and asked for the degree back, so the gantry moved back and forth. We had a lumen there protecting the uh, the pancake bot and it dripped. Basically, we had a little bit of control with the pancake batter, but we were able to accomplish our goal of making mickey mouse pancakes.
We posted this on youtube. It got 10. 000 hits the first day, which is incredible: a combination of pancakes and lego and robots really inspired people we’ll make one more pancake here, but the other thing is, i didn’t know how to draw with this thing.
Yet so i decided: what’s the easiest thing to draw a square, so we made a pancake truck now trying to flip. This thing was really really difficult. The way it works is as it’s turning the motor compresses air into the tank and drops it down and then, when it rotates the other way, it sucks the air back up to stop the blow of the batter.
Now these kits are available or the instructions are available online at pancakebot.com, it’s all open source, so you can get it yourself. Now, pancake pancakebot turned out to be a world traveler. We traveled to the new york maker faire, the oslo maker faire and the uk maker faire and now we’re here at the san mateo fair every time that we went to a maker faire.
We did something different. We first started off with brown pancakes. Then we spelled the word make at the uk maker faire and then we improved it to making seahorses for kids to even making spiderman.
Now this is what you can do with the lego. It’S sped up a little bit. It takes about four minutes to make a pancake.
Now this is a great teaching tool in school for kids, we use it in norway to teach kids about mechanics, to teach kids about lego, pneumatics and also some programming. We have the actual lego version over here in our booth, a little bit behind us, we’re almost done with spidey, and we got some great detail with it. You give it a flip and there we go. There’S spiderman for you made with a lego, pancake bot. Now it said, as i said, the pancake bot was used as a learning tool and can be used as a learning tool to teach mechanics. Pneumatics cartesian, coordinates, basics in electronics, program programming, even food safety. Now we’re taking it up a notch, because now we’re at the san mateo maker faire, we decided to create a new version of the pancake bot, which was more precise, better drawings, and we wanted off the shelf parts that we could buy that were open source. We made a laser cut design and with a new batter dispenser unit, and i got it right here to show you you can see it from the camera above right. There, it took six months to develop. We had eight different designs, six different types of batter dispenser units and two different prototypes, and we had many failures that doesn’t look very good and we had our first success and it was very interesting that there’s so many variables with pancake batter too much milk.
Not enough milk too much flour, not enough flour trying to control it with air trying to control it with a screw pump and here’s the new pancake bot, and i want to show you really quick, just two of the samples that we have here. If you can see them there and, of course, the pancake bar the new pancake bot is open source and we’re going to be seeing we’re looking at patenting it right now. But we also want to make an open source for the maker community. It uses the open source version right now uses an arduino mega and two eight of fruit shields and one proto shield.
It has a stepper motor with two driven stepper motor driven belts. It uses a g-code interpreter written by dan royer who’s over there from marginally clever.com and an interface written in processing by yandida berknes of kongsberg norway. The interface is really basic: it’s written in processing, draw or trace your images, and then you press print, and then you can enjoy your pancake. Well, you got to give it a little flip, we’re still working on automating the whole flip thing.
That’S a minor detail, we’ll figure it out later and this we figured. We put our logo as a pancake. Here’S a happy customer with her first hand-drawn pancake, another happy customer, my daughter, maya with her pancake and for all you mathematicians, we’re good to go. There’S makey! Okay, just one more thing: what do you do when you have a pancake bot? You make art with it, and here you well you’re supposed to do something like that.
Excuse me, okay, i’m gon na have to pass on that. I guess all right! Well um! Here we go. Thank you very much for your time enjoy the video. So ah you .