This weekend David Frank, Ryan Niemocienski, and I made a pancake robot for the 2015 Ohio State University Makeathon. It won 1st place, and I thought I’d share it.
In the 24 hours we made an iOS app that lets a user draw out a shape, a server in Python that receives the shape over wifi and translates it into a set of points, and finally a pancake robot powered by an Arduino Uno that draws out pancake batter in the shape.
The XY axis runs on drawer slides and is powered by two DC motors with encoders. The belts and pinions were from a replacement set for a reprap 3D printer. Most homemade XY axises we found were controlled by stepper motors not DC motors, so we had to do all the programing to control the path from scratch. The PID control was also done by us not using existing libraries.
To dispense the pancake batter, a pump from a Keurig coffee maker was used to pump air into the bottle, causing the batter to come out. Pressure build up made it hard to stop the batter from coming out, so a servo was added to kink and un-kink a section of tubing to relieve the pressure when needed.
David had never used arduino before and did most of the arduino programing, and Ryan had never used iOS and he did the app—so two new languages were learned during the course of this build.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/pancake-robot