Controlling a toaster oven robot with Arduino
As seen in our earlier post, James Bruton has been working on a breakfast-making robot, and has now moved from boiling eggs to making toast… or apparently hot dogs/sausages as shown in the video’s demo.
What he’s come up with uses a one degree-of-freedom gantry assembly to move servo-powered forks into position. These can then manipulate a cooking tray as needed to heat food up, flipping it out into a hand-held container when done. Two other servos take care of turning the device on and opening the door.
The control setup looks extremely similar to the previous build, with control via buttons, an Arduino Mega, and a small LCD display. Bruton notes that the Mega is used here because of its multiple serial ports, which will be useful to link everything together in the future.