The teams set their sights on designing the most durable, portable and low cost peanut butter making machines for a women's collective in Haiti. Powered by human hands and inspiring to the human heart, DS shows that engineering really can change lives.
- 1) The Challenge (4:28)
Watch the Show
Bonus Footage
Blue Team's Process
Red Team's Process
- 1) The Challenge (4:28)
- 2) Brainstorm (1:39)
- 3) Design (4:40)
- 4) Build (1:41)
- 5) Test (9:08)
- 6) Judging (6:35)
- 1) How to Make PB (01:00)
- 2) Peanut Toss (00:31)
- 3) Helping People (00:19)
- 4) Outside the Box! (00:36)
- 5) Nate's Pogo Stick (00:17)
- How do you design a peanut butter maker for women in Haiti to build and use? Blue Team experimented with a meat grinder and got some ideas from that.
- They planned to feed pre-crushed peanuts into the main grinding machine. They tied a brick to a wooden frame so the brick could be dropped repeatedly, crushing the peanuts.
- They drilled holes in the end cap of a PVC pipe and used a bicycle crank to turn an auger bit inside the pipe. The peanut butter came out through the drilled holes.
- Blue Team's design is similar to a machine that's used to push melted plastic into molds to make toys. This sort of machine is called a "single screw extruder" and here's how it works.
- Blue Team's peanut butter crusher was a pretty complicated and the peanut butter was kind of dry. If the screw turned within the tube and pushed on the broken peanuts, it would have worked faster, pressed out the oil, and made smoother peanut butter.
- But it made the right amount of peanut butter in the right amount of time, and the blue team was proud to win the challenge.
- How do you design a peanut butter maker for women in Haiti to build and use? The red team decided on a "mill" design.
- They used two rounded patio stones inside a bucket and rubbed them together with peanuts in between.
- They also attached a pole and handles to the center of the top stone. This let them stand up as they twisted the stones against each other to make peanut butter.
- Red Team's machine allowed them to crush and grind peanuts at the same time.
- Red Team's machine worked well, created edible peanut butter, and could be used by people who live in places that don't have electricity or other forms of reliable power.
- Their machine was actually simpler and cheaper to make than Blue Team's, but it would have been better if it didn't have to be taken apart to get at the peanut butter.
This engineer's invention makes clean water from astronaut urine. Don't believe us? Watch this!
Meet the designer of BEAR, a remote control rescue-robot.