How to make a perfect pancake? The DS teams seek the right ingredients for a machine that will cook, flip, and serve up delicious flapjacks at the flick of a switch. The winning machine is put to the (taste) test at a busy diner.
- 1) The Challenge (4:26)
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Blue Team's Process
Red Team's Process
- 1) The Challenge (4:26)
- 2) Brainstorm (10:47)
- 3) Design and Build (1:49)
- 4) Test (6:02)
- 5) Judging (4:30)
- How do you create a machine that can cook pancakes automatically? The blue team thought of a book-like machine that flipped the pancake from one side of the book to the other.
- They had a hard time thinking of a simple design since what's easy for a person may be hard for a machine. Finally Noah thought of the book idea and made a prototype out of foam.
- They made their flippers out of aluminum, rivets, and non-stick sheets. They added a hinge on one side and fixed cables to the flippers to create the flipping motion.
- They also built a wood frame and attached two motors to the tower to draw up the flippers on a spool. Timers were used to help flip the pancakes at the right moment.
- The key was to get the right amount of turning motion and the same cable tension on both flipper sheets, which took lots of fine-tuning.
- If the flippers had been bigger they could have made more pancakes. The pancakes were high-quality though and the machine was compact so Blue Team won the challenge.
- How do you create a machine that can cook pancakes automatically? Red Team designed a machine that utilized conveyor belts.
- Their first great idea was to cook both sides of the pancake at once, but this approach required lifting an entire cooking pan which was too difficult.
- They decided to make conveyor belts out of non-stick nylon sheets on PVC pipe rollers. They were held in a wood frame and moved by motors hooked up to timers.
- The design used two conveyor belts that moved the pancakes over flat griddles. By setting the height and speed of the conveyors correctly, the pancake completed a single flip and cooked both sides.
- Red Team tested their ideas out during brainstorm and design to see which ones could be built. Their final product made pancakes that were evenly cooked and a consistent size.
- The pancakes were high quality, and they could make lots at one time. But, since the two conveyor belts did not stack on top of each other, the machine was too big for the client's countertop.
This engineer at Ben & Jerry's creates specialized machinery to produce the perfect balance of Chunky and Monkey.
Build a machine out of cardboard.