Have you ever gone to slice a cake and ended up creating funky, uneven slices that weren’t as attractive as you’d hoped? Cutting a cake badly has happened to everyone at one time or another. Fortunately, it doesn’t take anything away from the taste of a cake, but using a gadget like the Mindstorm Cake Cutter would ensure that you get perfectly shaped cake slices, too. The mechanized cake cutter was built from Legos and uses a Mindstorm NXT processor, two touch sensors and three motors to do its work. The user simply enters the number of slices that they want to get from the cake, from 1 to infinity (although you would want to choose a number that would provide satisfying slices, of course), and the machine divides that cake into perfectly even slices. The “blade” is actually the lid of a can, which works like a pizza cutter to roll through the cake.
If you were to build on yourself, you might need to have a larger “knife” to cut through deeper layer cakes and you would definitely want to give the blade a spray with vegetable oil to help it slide through sticky frosting and make it easy to clean. A sharper blade (such as one that is actually from a pizza cutter) would let you cut pizzas and other, tougher foods. It would be fun to have some Jetsons-esque automation in the kitchen with a few robots to help out. Cake cutting might not seem like the most useful thing for a robot to do, but mixing and baking the cake is the fun part, so I would much rather have the robot help me out by cutting any number of perfect slices in my cake. That said, I don’t think I’m handy enough to build myself a cake cutting robot just yet, so I’ll stick to the old fashioned method of using knives for now!
Cathy
August 12, 2011Even with the shallow cutter, the robot could at least score the cake (or pizza) to give a guideline on how to cut the slices evenly.
Very cool!
Nia
August 13, 2011Wow, I wonder, what can’t Legos do. This machine is amazing, but I would need a bigger kitchen to put it to great use.
Olivia
August 14, 2011I am not very good at cutting even slices of cake. This machine is amazing! Cake cutting is NOT a piece of cake. 🙂
pasquentmax
December 27, 2011It’s just a similar copy of my original creation which I made in 2009. It’s just as windle to publish this video. You can see the original here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXdBEkYzegI