Well, this robot is supposed to increase productivity and hygiene, however, there’s one little detail that I found interesting: the workers feeding the pancakes to the machine are doing so with their bare hands, they are not wearing gloves. That does not compute if you are actually trying to increase hygiene.
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Cripes..all this effort for idiots who cannot make a simple pancake.
The final solution!
9 times out of ten when machines fails it is user error.
Cursor_
maybe your wife would like one
All this technology just to makes stacks of 4 pancakes?????
Brain the size of a planet and all they want me to do is stack pancakes.
Who buys pre-cooked pancakes? For god’s sake.
This has reduced their labor costs. I.e. they fired the idiots whose job was to count to four. Where the hell are these people gonna find work? Nowhere. They go on the dole and we all get to contribute to their welfare just because SOME people are too damned stupid to cook a pancake.
(Bobbo: I know. the logic is wrong. If people made their own pancakes, the count-to-four crowd would still be out of work. But, do we HAVE to be logical when the subject is f’ing PANCAKES?)
I for one welcome our new pancake making overlords and shall anoint their bounty in syrupy goodness at every opportunity.
It’s a good thing the T-1000s will now have breakfast.
I should look into getting one of those for the next Boy Scout camp out. Instead of us Dads standing shoulder to shoulder flipping pancakes for the hundreds of hungry scouts, we could pull up recliners drink beer and watch the Honeytop pancake robot do its thing.
@Gasparrini: While I once thought that gloves == hygiene, after working in food service during my college days, I know that is often not true. Gloves can lull people into a false sense of cleanliness, while bare hands make it more obvious to the worker when they touch something not clean. How many times have you seen a worker at Subway or similar handle money with their gloved hand, then go back to making sandwiches with the same glove?
That said, if you have any cuts or other damaged skin, you must wear gloves, but a properly washed hand is fine and often better for food prep (sterile surgical conditions require higher standards than safe food prep, which is why surgeons must wear gloves).
There’s more problems with the surrounding air than there is a washed hand or two handling food. Latex is a tree sap that is not meant to come in contact with the skin. It can have nasty direct effects and cause skin cancer. Latex gets in food this way also. Why doesn’t the health departments ban this substance?
Reminds me of the tractor salesman who went to China in the 50’s. He stated his machine could replace fifty men. The Chinese official asks, then what will we do with the fifty men. Demand for cheap goods will eventually destroy an economy, besides I never tried a frozen pancake that tasted worth a shit.
#7 Animby, I have the same question. The average IQ in America is 100. Robots are replacing the 100 IQ people who used to do menial work. Where will these replaced people find jobs? They’re not smart enough to do anything that takes more brainpower. As we build more and more robots to do menial labor, these people will become… obsolete. And as robots get smarter, smarter people will become obsolete.
The old science fiction novels used to portray a utopia where no one had to work, everyone had robots looking after them. The reality is that the benefit of the robots goes only to those who own them, leaving an increasingly large percentage of the population out in the cold with no work.
I worked as a cnc operator for 7 years, I am guessing that machine probably cost about $250,000.00 to $500,000.00 easy.
So its going to take along time to pay for itself, and by the time it does it will be obsolete in comparison to the by then newer gen of “pancake stacker” robots.
Why in the heck a pancake stacking operation needed automation is beyond me, but hey I,ll bet the machines rep made a great sale that day.
I used to run $500,000.00 machines the size of a large school bus that made parts the size of a banana, lol.
Phydeau:
“Today, the fifty fourth president of the United States, officially announced his plan to provide uninsured Americans with personal robots. Members of the Alfie1 sect have rioted on the north lawn after they discovered, among the details of the “public” option, a provision for “access” panels they conclude will allow the robots to become pleasure machines.” – – –
# 12 1010902 said, “Latex is a tree sap that is not meant to come in contact with the skin. It can have nasty direct effects and cause skin cancer.”
OMG!!! Is my dick gonna rot off?
I’m going to my “massage therapist” tonight and have her check for spots…
Especially when they could have one in lego instead
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoXCn4Gh_HA
The flexpicker is a clever design of robot for handling food type where the shape/size/position varies.
I posted once before its been years since I had a pancake, then about 2 months ago I thought: Lets have a pancake for breakfast. It was fantastic. The recipe should vary according to taste, but here is my current brew:
1/2 Cup Buckwheat
1/4 Cup Whole Wheat
1/4 Cup Oat Flour
3 Tbs Corn Meal
5 Tbs Powdered Milk
1.5 Tbs Wheat Germ
1 Tbs Sugar
1.5 Tbs Baking Powder
1/8 Ts Salt
The above is all mixed up in a 5 pound can. In the morning, I scoop out 3/4 cup of the mix, and add one whipped up egg with 1/2 cup water–nice and foamy for the air bubbles. Then I adjust by adding more water if needed for the right consistency of batter. A thicker batter actually makes the final pancake taste slightly different.
I use my crepe pan and heat it with a teaspoon of olive oil. Wait until it just starts to smoke, then pour the batter on.
I also make my own home made syrup, but that will have to wait for a thread on honey, berries, or high fructose corn syrup.
Anyway, “the market” serves all needs. Those too stupid to make their own pancakes do need a factory to make it for them.
And yes==”the market” decides how many people work, what they do, and what per centage are redundant. We could have a shortage of workers right now, 100% employment by simply outlawing electonic switching devices. Call it “public safety against the danger of radiation” and all of us could work overtime manually doing the work of a 25 cent circuit.
I’m still waiting for the rupture.
WHOa!==make that 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder. I musta been thinking scones when I typed that.
Great Chefs must be an untapped source of wisdom. They know/learn/deal with the results of many variables constantly interacting with one another==all regardless of what the Chef’s own dreams and motivations may be. Hard to come to grips with that reality all day long over the hot stove and then come home to think about social issues in any other way????? Unless you gotta go down to the basement and visit your locked up daughter that is.
Ok, maybe Chef’s are just like the rest of us.
#13–RTaylor==that reminds me of that plant that blew up in Bhopal India a few years back? I think part of the problem is that it was designed with technology that was 50 years old in order to employ more people==so fewer automatic valves and what not, leading to the explosion. The plans for such plants can’t be found anymore which has lead to India joining the first world as a force in manufacturing.
Yep==its all social planning brought to you by our good elected folks operating on the net of their conflicts of interest.
Why would a robot stake (see title of article) the pancakes anyway? Are they blood sucking pancakes?
[Fixed. – ed.]
Pedro–yes I did. Or even “milk.” I had some buttermilk left over from making cheese and tried it in the pancakes. I could not taste it at all so I see no reason to pay extra for it. I’ll use it when I have it to get rid of it, but thats about it.
Once you have any “recipe” at all, its fun to play with the other variables, and it really does get mind blowing: how hot the gridle is before you pour the batter, the temperature profile during the cooking of the pancake, how much moisture is in the batter, olive oil vs butter vs lard. When I can “taste” the difference in the above variables, and not taste the difference between milk and buttermilk, I think that is “telling.” Many recipes put an “emphasis” on using buttermilk. I don’t think it is warranted, and how buttermilk supposedly activates baking powder/vs Soda doesn’t make a difference from what I can tell.
Further funny—I can “get into food” in this detail, or just eat any crap to get filled up. All depends on my mindset going into the meal. Kinda like this blog?
Has the midnight shift hacked into the robot and programmed it to arrange the pancakes into words such as:
DONUTS RULE!
HELLO CARL THIS IS GOD
WILL YOU MARRY ME?
This technology was actually bought from Hewlett-Packard after they discovered that there was no market for a .08 dpi dot matrix printer.
[Ed. – Comment deleted for violation of posting guidelines]
wait…what sort of f*cked up world are we living in that it is necessary for a factory to make pancakes, for a machine to stack them, and for ungloved workers to stand there watching a machine.
This makes even less sense than the reality that all our steel mills have gone overseas (to China), that the only thing “made in america” is junk food and cheap swill, and the only jobs to be had are either a.) government, b.) fast food, or c.) paper pushers
I have one thing to say: don’t eat fast food, don’t by the packaged frozen pancakes, and stop being a stupid consumer.