At the recent Bay Area Maker Faire, Miguel Valenzuela displayed his Pancakebot. Pancakebot is exactly what it sounds like, a printer that extrudes pancake batter into fun shapes from digital drawings. The machine still looks trapped in the second dimension, but it demonstrates an element still missing from a good deal of food printers: a cooking element. With machines like the Foodini 3D food printer, you can extrude non-cooked food that should either be served raw or still need to be fried up. Pancakebot, however, squirts batter directly onto a hotplate so that, when the pancakes are done printing, they’re also ready to eat.
The idea originated when Valenzuela read about a pancake stamping machine made from legos. He then told his eldest daughter, Lily, about the pancake stamping machine, who turned to her sister and said, that there father was going to build a pancake machine out of LEGO. Not wishing to crush the dreams of a three-year-old, Valenzuela constructed the Lego Pancakebot. The inventor sees his robotic pancake maker as a great way to get kids involved in engineering.
Since then, he has upgraded the machine and flew all the way from Norway to San Francisco to show it off. His next stop for Pancakebot is the Maker Faire in Paris in June.
While you can’t yet purchase the Pancakebot, Miguel has uploaded instructions on how to build the Lego version.
