(As this is my first post please bare with me, I'm not a electronic engineer or some great and brilliant scientist but rather a simple carer who looks after someone and comes up with new ways to improve the lives of others)
Yes indeed, the breakfast machine long sort after by many people, this device has been shown in movies and tv programs all over the world, however is it possible?
While i'm not electronically minded, I am able to put things together in my head to come up with a new ideas, the breakfast machine i beleive should be a combination of many different devices, so a hack would be an appropiate word for such a project. After searching down at my local library and on the net, the only breakfast machines i could find was in the style of Rube Goldberg, this is NOT a breakfast machine, Rube Goldberg machines are doing the simplist tasks in the most complex way, quite the oppisite, eh?, and the other was those toaster oven combinations, not quite what i had in mind for a breakfast machine.
So for a proper breakfast machine, we need to cover the basics first, power and control come to mind, while i'm with the whole eco saving i have to put down a few rules:
1: This machine will draw quite alot of power so it would be best if only one or two devices were active at any time during its operation.
2: It has to be all one unit, no string pulling, cog turning mamby famby, all in one box, compact.
3: And lastly a simple interface, after watching The Ben Heck show i now know that digital readouts are common in projects like this.
So, lets cover what we can have in our breakfast, i'm from the UK so the full english is my cup of tea (please feel free to add your own breakfast choices).
Mmm, bacon, we love the smell and taste so much it is included in almost every breakfast served around the world, hell, we eat 18 billion pounds of it every year so it is very popular. Cooking bacon is a personal preference, some like it fried, while others like it grilled, i've even heard of some even oven cooking it, but for me grilling is the healthier option (the best option would be not to have it, but what would be the point in that?), so grilling it is then, while i know that taking apart a toaster oven to get at the filiments sounds like a great idea and it would cook the bacon quite fast, it would be quite dangerous to put together and make sure it doesn't melt the box its placed in, however all is not lost, when i was a kid i had a toy oven that cooked cakes by light, these lightbulbs get very hot very quickly and have been used in other bacon cooking devices (I saw one in a electronic store that was supposed to cook bacon five minutes before you got up another is to cook chickens and other foods), so having something like this would be a better option, its more compact and much safer than exposing heating elements.
Sausage and hash browns would be cooked in a similar manner to the bacon, but maybe a more intense bulb would be needed.
Eggs, oh boy, this is a little harder to do, once again cooking eggs is a personal preference, some like them boiled while others like them fried, for me its fried but how?, while i'm always thinking of new ways to cook things this one hasn't changed for me, to fry an egg is easy for a human, getting a machine to do it is messy and the simplist idea is usually the best, so here we go, bare with me here.
In one of my local shops i saw a small non stick frying pan, my idea was to remove the handle and have the pan sit on a heat source, however after realising that this could set the whole house on fire i rethought my idea, to include a small induction unit but this drains alot of power, however if the machine was programmed to cook the eggs last it wouldn't waste as much power, after all, who wants hard eggs?
Beans and mushrooms, (if you like mushrooms or not its the same system), this one was a little difficult, i had wanted to use induction like the eggs, but something happens to beans when they're not stirred periodically, they stick to the bottom of the pan and burn and if you keep stiring them they go mushy, yep, so heres how i figured it out along with the mushies, i took a tin and then I put a smaller tin inside it, the gap between the two tins was large enough for a copper pipe to fit in a coil, using the steam from a coffee' machine (i'll get into how that fits in later) to pass through the gap or the pipe the heat the beans and mushrooms without burning them, keeping them hot untill everything is ready and saving energy.
Toast, this is one of the first things i came up with when i was solving some problems, i always come back to this when i'm trying to figure something out because its so simple, for this to work all that is needed is a small stainless steel toaster and a hinge, yeah, thats it, the way it works is that when the machine is turned on a small loader (like in a vending machine, they turn and the chocolate bar falls out) drops the toast into the toaster and when the toaster is finished it drops the toast out of the bottom onto the plate, i'm not too sure as to how to control the release mechinism but the idea is sound. Buttering the toast is a must for me, can't stand plain toast, this one was to just drop those packets of butter onto the plate.
Drinks, (almost done, if you've kept up this far thanks for reading)
This one was easier not to tamper with, i have a very small coffee' maker that would be placed inside, since the whole of the water is boiled hence being forced through the pipe and into the cup, there would be a heat proof (food safe) plastic divider in the resivour so half the boiled water would be transfered to the beans and the mushroom cookers and the rest would go to your waiting cup with your tea bag or instant coffee' already in it (i personally prefer orange juice but i haven't figured out a way to put a cooling unit into this design yet), unlike the rest of the machine which is all inclosed, the cup would be on the outside waiting to be picked up while you wait.
Thats all i got for now, while it wouldn't be possible for me to make something like this, many of you could but what i'm hoping is that it will be accepted as a challenge by Ben Heck, it sounds very complicated however it has a simple design layout and would work if time was commited to it, if someone is building it or something like it, please let me know i would love to see it.
Thanks
DannyS
PS
I apologise for some misspelling here and there, but that's what you get when you write at 2.00am
