We love Lego. We love robots. And we sure love breakfast. So what could be better than a Lego-based robot ready and willing to whip up a perfectly cooked breakfast? Reminiscent of Caractacus Potts’ breakfast-preparing contraption from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the so-called “Breakfast Machine” is a brick creation capable of breaking eggs, disposing of the shells, and then cooking and plating up bacon and eggs. It’s probably not a labor-saving device per se, but it’s definitely a nifty one.
“My son Michael and me are the two people behind The Brick Wall YouTube channel,” Canada-based creator Iouri Petoukhov told Digital Trends. “We have designed and built a Lego machine that can assist in cooking a real egg and bacon breakfast. The idea was to build a remotely controlled machine that will automate breakfast cooking process and pick the egg off the frying pan. We also wanted it to be able to make several different variations, [such as] ‘sunny-side-up’, scrambled, and ‘sunny-side-down.’ We are extremely happy with the result.”
Petoukhov said that the project grew out of his love of cooking breakfast for his family each weekend. His son, however, obviously decided that this was one more job robots could steal from good, hard-working humans since he began work on the Breakfast Machine as a birthday gift for his dad.
“The biggest challenge was to build a mechanism that will be able to pick an egg, move it to the right position, crack it open without losing the shell, and bring the shell back,” Petoukhov continued. “We realized that the heart of the build will be the cracking mechanism. We reviewed several commercial egg crackers to better understand how it is done. However, the challenge was how to do the same with Lego. It [ultimately] took 12 eggs, two weeks, and numerous failures to figure out the right design. [We jumped for joy] when the first egg was successfully cracked and the shell stayed inside the grabber.”
This isn’t the first impressive impressive build the Brick Wall duo have assembled. Previous projects have included a working lawnmower and even a 986-part Lego Roomba, complete with its own pilot.
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