Category Archives: edible

Hold the Salt and Butter, This Popcorn Is For a Robot

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Popcorn! Light and fluffy, it is a fantastically flexible snack. We can have them plain, create a savory snack with some salt and butter, or cover with caramel if you have a sweet tooth. Now Cornell University showed us one more way to enjoy popcorn: use their popping action as the mechanical force in a robot actuator.

It may be unorthodox at first glance, but it makes a lot of sense. We pop corn by heating its water until it turns into steam triggering a rapid expansion of volume. It is not terribly different from our engines burning an air-fuel …read more

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Problems that Plagued an Edible Marble Machine

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Prolific creator [Martin Raynsford] recently created a plus-sized edible version of his laser-cut Marble Machine for a Cake International exhibit and competition; it seemed simple to do at first but had quite a few gotchas waiting, and required some clever problem-solving.

The original idea was to assemble laser-cut gingerbread parts to make the machine. Gingerbread can be laser-cut quite well, and at first all seemed to be going perfectly well for [Martin]. However, after a few days the gingerbread was sagging badly. Fiddling with the recipe and the baking was to no avail, and it was clear [Martin] needed to …read more

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Pancake-ROM: Eat-only Memory?

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You can store arbitrary data encoded in binary as a pattern of zeros and ones. What you do to get those zeros and ones is up to you. If you’re in a particularly strange mood, you could even store them as strips of chocolate on Swedish pancakes.

Oddly enough, the possibility of the pancake as digital storage medium was what originally prompted [Michael Kohn] to undertake his similar 2013 project where he encoded his name on a paper wheel. Perhaps wisely, he prototyped on a simpler medium. With that perfected, four years later, it was time to step up to …read more

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33C3: Edible Soft Robotics

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Certainly one of the more entertaining talks of the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress was [Kari Love]’s talk on her experiments in mixing food with function. In [Kari]’s talk at the 2016 Hackaday Supercon, she talked extensively about working on soft robotic for NASA. At the 33C3, her focus was twofold: on a fun side project to make mobile robots out of stuff that you can eat, and to examine the process of creative engineering through the lens of a project like this.

If you look up edible robotics, you get a lot of medical literature about endoscopes that you can …read more

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The Science of Sean Spicer’s Compulsive Gum Swallowing Habit

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We wanted a second opinion about Spicer’s gum consumption habit (he said he chews and swallows more than two packs a day), so we talked to a doctor about it. Continue reading The Science of Sean Spicer’s Compulsive Gum Swallowing Habit→