A Cooking Machine – Demo Dish Choices & Smart Features

This is the second in a series detailing the processes behind the research, design, material selection, assembly and programming of a cooking machine. See A Cooking Machine— Research & Design for the first post.

Deciding on the first demo dish for the cooking machine is an essential step that will guide and inform the design. The demo dish I choose will have specific cooking procedures that will determine the electronics and software that I will utilize for my cooking machine. In this post, I will introduce the selected demo dish and its corresponding cooking steps, the demo dish’s cooking preset procedures using the cooking robot, and the technical hardware and software components needed. 

Demo Dish: One-pot Tomato and Chickpea Stew

Figure 1.One-pot Tomato & Chickpea Stew Preparation, Cooking & End Result

Demo Dish Cooking Instructions & Required Components:

This section uses our demo dish, One-pot Tomato and Chickpea Stew, to illustrate the design of the cooking robot. Specific hardware and software components are listed for each step along with a brief description.

General Preset Cooking Steps for Each Dish: (using an iPhone app)

The following table describes the general steps and corresponding components (with explanation) to preset a specific dish the user wants to cook. Although this preset procedure seems cumbersome, it allows the user to do it once and the dish can be prepared by the cooking machine time and time again.    

An ending note:

I really hope this cooking robot can be applicable to the demo dish – my favorite One-pot Tomato and Chickpea Stew. As an engineer, I know from experience that although none of my ideas go smoothly the first time I try them out, I’m ready to experiment with different hardware components to see what works best. 

For the next post, I’ll look into other dishes that I can potentially test on my cooking machine to see what other dishes can be made. Additional hardware/software tools might need to be added to accommodate new dishes. Stay tuned :)