Matter and Void | Ideas

Some musings. Some serious some less-so things that maybe should exist.

Automated Cookware

2014-01-08T16:51:39Zidea

I like to cook very minimal meals and found myself eating the same things over and over: rice, beans, pasta, steamed vegetables. Pretty basic, but also healthy. Anyway, as a natural side effect of being a programmer, I thought abstractly about how all these things are prepared and realized they’re roughly all the same:

  • Measure dry ingredients
  • Measure water

Then either:

  • Boil the water
  • Add ingredients

or:

  • Rinse ingredients in water
  • Add ingredients and water together and then boil

Pretty much the same thing over and over again. Why not automate it?

The overall idea is to control the boiling with a hot plate on a timer via an arduino or raspberry pi and dispense the ingredients via a predetermined number of rotations of one of these:

food dispenser

You’d also need a pump to control the water, and a couple of motors with multiple containers to rinse the ingredients and to mix them if needed.

You could then hookup a web server to it and control it remotely, for example, starting it when you leave work and have the ingredients of a meal waiting for you when you get home!

It would definitely be a lot of effort, but I imagine some industrial individuals could make a self contained appliance that works for any water-plus-ingredients food.

Dan Vingo
This is the personal site of Daniel Vingo