Decorating cakes probably require some amount of artistic skills. Unfortunately, you have none. If you have already bought Cricut Cake machine and now with the AutoFrost Cake Decorator in tow, you can pretty much start advertising yourself as a professional cake decorator.
Built by a group of students from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, the system involves both a cake-frosting machine and a graphics software where you can fashion the designs you want performed on your baked mass of flour and sugar. Simply “print” the graphic you created onto a slab of sweet dough and the automaton does the actual decorating all on its own.
The AutoFrost Cake Decorator is a 3-axis “printing” machine that shoots frosting onto cake as specified from the Paint-like software GUI. Written in Python, the PC application sends the necessary signals over PySerial to two Arduino controllers — the first one manages the motion of the nozzle, while the other takes care of dispensing the frosting from a plunger.
Majority of the parts were machined in-house to keep costs down, while the handle, frosting dispenser, threaded rod and electronics were all store-bought. According to the team, it’s the first version of the project, with future iterations allowing you to vary the nozzle shapes, as well as automatically sensing the size and shape of the cakes you put in the tray.
I have no idea about the market for a machine like the AutoFrost Cake Decorator, but it’s definitely a viable way to automate the work of slathering your cake with creative frostings. You can check out the project page to find more information, as well as the video below to see it in action.
[Olin]