Hasta La Gadget!

Over at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering near Boston, Massachusetts, the students know what makes a worthwhile project. The AutoFrost is a robot which has one delicious purpose: frosting cakes.

The human operator enters some basic cake-stats, like size and color, and then hits the splendidly-worded go-button: “I’m ready to design an amazing cake”. He is then dropped into a paint program with a circa-1990 interface, where the designing is done. This custom-coded app then controls the AutoFrost ‘bot itself.

A pair of stepper motors and threaded rods move both the icing nozzle and the cake. They are controlled by two Arduinos and stepper motors. The frosting plunger is manually positioned at the right height over the tasty cake and the frosting is squeezed out using a servo motor on a rack and pinion system.

There’s still a little work to be done (apart from slicing and eating the cake) – to change colors, a human has to swap on the new frosting before the AutoFrost can resume – but so what? It’s a frikkin’ robot that decorates cakes. If you watch the video all the way through you’ll see that the icing on the cake, as it were, is when the ‘bot finishes up its task by crossing the “t” and dotting the “i”, just like the operator did when when designing the cake.

Future plans include different nozzle sizes, auto cake-size sensing, and more than a few brisk walks to combat calories gained in the name of research.

AutoFrost Cake Decorator [Olin via Oh Gizmo]

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The Bottoms Up beer dispenser can pour up to 44 pints a minute, with just one person using it. Add a few helpers and it can reach 56 pints per minute, not far off one per second. That’s impressive enough, but take a look at how the glasses are “poured.” The machine fills them from the bottom:

This would be a fantastic addition to English pubs, where the 19 and 20-year old bartenders lack motivation and brains to the extent that one pint a minute is a miracle, and then the glass will be half-filled with foam. And that’s if you can get their attention to begin with.

But how does this magical machine work? Obviously, the cups have holes, but how do they reseal? Magnets. The plastic glasses have a floppy fridge-magnet inside, a circle which sticks itself to a corresponding donut-shape strip around the filling-hole. Here’s a birds-eye view, grabbed from a video on the product site.

So, the Bottoms Up pumps are fast, can hook up to any keg and – provided you have the rest of your gear clean and properly adjusted – you won’t waste beer via foam. But there is an obvious problem: waste of those glasses. Instead of a glass glass, which can be re-used over and over, these are designed to be disposable, to the extent that the little magnetic discs are pushed as an advertising opportunity:

A magnet on the fridge of the American household gets 20 impressions per day per person in the household, making this ad space the most viewed souvenir taken home from a venue. That also means it is taken home from the venue!

Still, who cares about that, right? After all, with beer coming at you at nine-times the normal speed, it’s hard to care about anything else.

Bottoms Up [Grinon Industries. Thanks, Mr. Abell!]

See Also:

• It's Beer O'Clock! Watch Has Built-In Bottle Opener
• How Wired.com Built Beer Robot, Our DIY Kegerator
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Often the best kitchen gadgets are the cheapest, or at lest the most basic. Royal VKB and Nikolai Carels’ Boomerang Wok, though, tries to make the case that fancier can sometimes – almost – be better.

A cheap, carbon-steel wok from your local Chinese supplies store is the best wok you can get. It’s tough, it has a rounded bottom for gas (the only place you’ll get it hot enough) and it skips non-stick coatings, which burn-off or go bad at the kind of temperatures a wok likes. Properly seasoned (ie. not cleaned) it will become completely non-stick and last forever.

The Boomerang Wok commits the usual fancy wok sins: Teflon, a plastic handle, a stupid price ($150!). But it has a lip at the far end which lets you toss the food with a flick of the wrist, only to return safely into the pan’s center.

Any half skilled cook can manage this most basic of chefs’ techniques, which involves jerking the wok (or sauté pan) away from you, flicking the wrist to launch the food and then catching it. But then, the kind of person who would spend $150 on a non-stick wok is not the kind of person to learn a basic cooking technique. Still, I guess the Boomerang will look nice on their countertop, right next to the block of Global knives they use to open their mail.

Boomerang Wok + Sauté Pan [A Plus R via Uncrate]

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Can you believe that, in the 21st century, a place filled with household lasers, instant worldwide communication and Daft Punk’s amazing new Tron album, you cannot buy wine in a grocery store in Pennsylvania? Liquor can only be bought from state-owned and controlled stores.

But there’s a technological workaround – although it seems as much in the spirit (ahem) of the law as is the Sabbath mode available on some kitchen appliances. It uses vending machines, which are legal, and it goes like this:

Each machine is connected to a state employee in Harrisburg, via video-camera. A customer chooses their wine, swipes their ID, puffs into a breathalyzer and faces the camera. The state employee checks that the ID matches the person and, if they’re not already intoxicated, the person is allowed to buy the wine (the machine vends only wine right now).

What next? Backscatter nude-o-grams to make sure you’re not already carry another bottle? Oh, and as if this wasn’t bad enough, the first store with the machine, Giant Eagle in Robinson, only keeps it switched on until 9PM.

Clearly these laws aren’t meant to protect the people. Rather, a state monopoly on booze is a clear money-spinner for the local government. Still, the workaround is admirable, in a hi-tech, convoluted fashion, which is exactly the kind of workaround we like. Of course, this machine will never come close to the sublime ale-dispenser that is Wired.com’s Beer Robot.

A wine vending machine… [Daily Mail]

Daft Punk’s amazing new Tron album [Spotify]

Photo: Mr T in DC / Flickr

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AEG spent eight years developing a new dishwasher arm. Why? Because the old arms just don’t cut it anymore. When engineer Fredrik Dellby took a look at his loaded dishwasher, he realized that while the appliance is essentially the same as what we used in the 1970s, the contents had changed completely, from the cookware and tableware inside to the food-scraps stuck to the plates.

The best way to get efficient cleaning is to make the dishwasher cylindrical so that the spray-arm can reach every part of the box. That wouldn’t work who has a cylinder-shaped hole in their kitchen? Dellby’s answer was to reinvent the arm, which turned out to be a lot harder than it would seem.

The Proclean arm is pretty much just a regular arm with another arm on the end. This second bar spins and sprays its jets of water in eccentric patterns. This attacks the dirt from various angles, blasting it off. The almost random movements are inspired by the movements of the human arm when scrubbing pots: we work in circles, but they’re far from identical or even. The secondary arm also reaches a lot further into the corners of the box, like the single, eccentric windshield-wiper you see on a Mercedes.

What took so long? Perfecting the arm. A dishwasher arm is powered by the water that it spits out, and this, along with the precise nozzle designs, makes it hard to predict the behavior of even a single, fixed arm. Dellby’s team had to not only redesign the arm, but also the design and testing process itself. That took a while.

The story of the process (sadly rather light on technical details) in on show at AEG’s new State of the Arm online exhibit, which also showcases the designs of other arms, from the tonearm on a turntable to our own arms, which have shrunk as evolution stopped our knuckles from dragging on the floor. Check it out while you’re waiting for AEG to put the arm into its dishwashers. Hopefully it won’t take another eight years.

The Proclean Arm Story [AEG]

The State of the Arm [AEG]

See Also:

• Lego dishwasher tray unveiled
• Gallery: Crazy Space-Saving Designs for the Homes of the Future …