Breakfast Gets Better: PancakeBot Lets You Print Your Own Pancakes
Who among us didn’t aspire to dazzling heights of pancake artistry when they were a kid? And who among us didn’t usually end up with nothing but crooked smiley faces and lumpy butterflies? A new Kickstarter is endeavoring to surpass those failed pancake dreams of youth with the PancakeBot, the world’s first 3D pancake printer that uses batter instead of ink to create the wildest designs you can imagine.
The PancakeBot has everything except the batter; it includes a commercial-quality nonstick griddle, an SD card slot for custom designs, Mac- and Windows-compatible software and even pre-loaded pancake designs. For those bold souls who’d rather create their own designs, the software allows you to trace any image — such as a logo, a cartoon character, a random drawing or the Eiffel tower — and store it on the included SD card. The PancakeBot will then draw whatever image you’ve traced and deposit the batter directly onto the griddle.
![PancakeBot prototype in action. Via Kickstarter/PancakeBot](gif/pancakebot.gif)
PancakeBot prototype in action. Via Kickstarter/PancakeBot
Using a “smart batter dispensing system” that involves a combination of compressed air and a vacuum, the robot printer squirts the batter in a controlled fashion; onboard controls allow pancake chefs to “fine tune” the dispensing of the batter, according to the Kickstarter page.
Creator and civil engineer Miguel Valenzuela was inspired to make a pancake machine for his two young daughters after reading about someone who made a pancake stamping machine out of LEGOs, according to the project’s Kickstarter page. After first making a LEGO version himself, Valenzuela began working on a more advanced acrylic version that debuted in 2014. This year, he partnered with StoreBound in an attempt to get the PancakeBot into homes by mid-2015.
Although the project only went up on Kickstarter this month, it’s already surpassed its $50,000 funding goal by almost $15,000. According to its timeline, tooling and production are estimated to begin in May/June, and shipping could begin in July, although the final design, mechanics and software interface still need to be tweaked. With any luck, though, every aspiring pancake artist will soon be a master!