Planet Arduino

Automated cocktail machines can be fun projects, but this device by CamdenS5 takes things to a whole new level. Not only can it pour liquids from multiple bottles, but it chops limes, dispenses sugar and mint, and even features a refrigerated compartment to keep ingredients at the appropriate temperature.

An Arduino Mega along with an Uno are employed for control, while user interface is provided by an Android tablet affixed to the front of the assembly. 

There’s a lot going on mechanically inside, including a linear actuator for chopping, and augers that dole out mint/sugar as needed. 

Details on the build are available here, with code/files ready for download, and an interactive Fusion 360 model that you can manipulate in your browser.

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.

Despite some challenges with I2C and rebuilding their dispenser design, they managed to finish the build ahead of schedule. A future version will include more topping options, condiment choices, and a more streamlined voice-to-sandwich process.

If, however, you prefer to play with your food, then by all means turn it into an RC car.

[Thanks for the tip, Nils Hitze!]

It’s no secret that a lot of time, money, and effort goes into photographing and filming all that delicious food you see in advertisements. Mashed potatoes in place of ice cream, carefully arranged ingredients on subs, and perfectly golden french fries are all things you’ve seen so often that they’re taken for granted. But, those are static shots – the food is almost always just sitting on a plate. At most, you might see a chef turning a steak or searing a fillet in a commercial for a restaurant. What takes real skill – both artistic and technical – is assembling a hamburger in mid-air and getting it all in stunning 4k video.

That’s what [Steve Giralt] set out to do, and to accomplish it he had to get creative. Each component of the hamburger was suspended by rubber bands, and an Arduino timed and controlled servo system cut each rubber band just before that ingredient entered the frame. There’s even a 3D printed dual-catapult system to fling the condiments, causing them to collide in the perfect place to land in place on the burger.

In order to get this shot, [Steve] needed two things: precise timing and a robotic camera system to follow the burger down as it was assembled as it fell. The timing was taken care of with a control system he designed himself (which he’ll reuse for future projects). The robotic camera was a commercial unit capable of repeatedly following a preprogrammed path. You can see in the video below how it rotates around the hamburger to achieve a really cool 3D effect. Obviously a camera-wielding robot like the one [Steve] used is very expensive, but with a little ingenuity a DIY build is certainly possible.

[thanks to DMPalmer for the tip]

Food Screening is an Arduino-based project inspired by the act of watching films while eating meals alone, and was conceived especially for people living on their own abroad. The installation–developed by visual communicator Fongyee Ng in collaboration with Han–gyeol Lee–uses light and distance sensors to create an interaction with each food item, which triggers a snippet from a film that mimics the sound effects of consuming the meal, making eating alone a more entertaining experience.

This x-y plotter uses coffee drips — each carefully calibrated for size and height — to create these portraits.

Read more on MAKE

The post This Machine Prints Portraits with 8,000 Drops of Coffee appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

BetaWolf is a scientist fascinated by physics, chemistry,  mathematics and especially the symmetry of phenomena in nature and the way humans describe them in the form of fundamental laws. He submitted to our blog a project focused on measuring water activity powered by Arduino Pro Mini :

Water activity? And why would I want to measure it? Food always contains a certain amount of ‘free’ or unbound water. The more unbound water is present, the easier it is for micro-organisms like fungi to grow. Hence, the shelf life of food products is shortened by the presence of unbound water. Water activity is a physical quantity that describes the amount of unbound water in a product. Therefore, by measuring the water activity, you can estimate the shelf life of food. Only problem is the incredible amount of money you have to pay for a commercial water activity meter. In this article I describe an easy and cheap water activity meter on the basis of a humidity sensor, an NTC, and an Arduino Pro Mini.

Check his blogpost for all the details about this project.

Read more on MAKE

Pixelate is a Guitar-Hero-style eating game in which players compete in a one-minute showdown to see who can eat the most food in the correct order.

It was exhibited at Henry Moore Gallery, Royal College of Art in London:

A digital interface built into a custom dining table shows players which foods to eat and when, while the game detects whether they’ve eaten the correct food by measuring the food’s resistance on the fork. Potential applications for Pixelate include encouraging children to eat more healthy foods, helping to manage portions, and educating children and adults about nutrition. Built using Arduino and openFrameworks, Pixelate gamefies the act of eating, challenging players to consider whether they think before they eat, or eat before they think.