Automatic Cheese Toastie Machine
By Andrew Gregory. Posted
This article was originally published as part of HackSpace magazine, which has since been incorporated into Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.
The cheese toastie is part of the staple diet of students, full as it is with delicious salt, fat, and beer-absorbing carbohydrate. Mitchell Riek, Taylor Tabb, and Evan Hill from Carnegie Mellon University in the USA have taken this one step further with an automatic cheese toast-making machine.
A vacuum system lifts a slice of bread into place, followed by a slice of cheese and another slice of bread; the assembled sandwich is pushed into a grilling machine. Then, when it’s done, a second lever pushes the finished snack into a delivery slot. It even squirts butter onto the surfaces in contact with the heated grill.
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The mechanical parts of this robotic sandwich maker are controlled by an Arduino Mega, with voice activation enabled by Google Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi. In an extra special twist, the students have programmed the Cheeseborg such that you have to say ‘please’ when you ask for a grilled cheese sandwich or it won’t work – a sensible way to ensure that when the robots rise up, these three students at least will be spared.
Features Editor Andrew trawls the internet for Cool Stuff while keeping the magazine running smoothly.
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