Creating the future of desserts: an interactive smart cake | Viam
Creating the future of desserts: an interactive smart cake
Discover how one of our Developer Advocates, alongside a pastry chef, created a smart, interactive cake that blends robotics with baking for a unique dessert experience.
Overview
I attended the 95th New York Hardware Meetup on Smart Cities and IoT at Viam headquarters and during the mingling period, I met a very interesting and fun attendee named Abigail. She told me she is a confectionery roboticist making bizarre cakes. Listen, two things make me very excited: desserts and robots. So I was already hooked. She showed me her website and our love story began.
Knowing that Viam was hosting a team event soon, I proposed the idea of collaborating with Abigail to create an interactive smart cake for the occasion. We arranged a meeting to discuss the project's scope, materials, and potential features. During our conversation, we delved into a recurring joke at Viam where everything is humorously referred to as a camera in principle. This led us to ponder: why not consider a cake as an edible camera component?
This is the cake we made, which is also a camera, posing with a camera, photo taken with yet another camera:
The final result of our build: a smart machine that you can eat too!
Our brainstorming session resulted in plans to incorporate LEDs, cameras for people detection, and other interactive components such as thermal printers and displays into the cake. We divided our roles, with me handling the technological aspects and Abigail taking charge of the cake-making process. With our roles defined, we dived into the prototyping phase. Here you can see our initial sketches.
Our initial sketches for our smart cake.
Imagine a cake that not only looks like a camera but houses a real camera inside, equipped with machine learning capabilities...
Requirements to build a cake like this yourself
If you want to build your own interactive cake, you need the following hardware, software, and modules.
Hardware
- Raspberry Pi, with microSD card
- Raspberry Pi display
- 5V power supply
- 24 RGB Neopixel LED ring
- Adafruit thermal printer
- Thermal paper receipt roll 2-1/4"
- USB webcam
- Arcade button
You also need some cake supplies like cake paint, cake mix, food coloring, fondant, etc.
Software
Modules
I used the following modules from the Viam Registry to interact with the neopixel and camera components.
Steps, if you need a cake yourself
Wire your electronics
Wire together your Raspberry Pi, NeoPixel, thermal printer, USB camera and power supply according to their wiring diagrams.
Wire the NeoPixel ring to the Pi
Make sure you wire the NeoPixel ring according to the guide...
Test your components
Test these components individually to see them working and debug in this step if anything is not working. You can test them in the Viam app.
Configure your components, services and modules
In the Viam app, create a new machine and give it a name like cake...
Assembling the cake
Now that the technical parts are done, we started to assemble the cake itself. I did some taste-test sessions which were super yummy.
A slice of the cake which I fully enjoyed - thanks Abagail!
These are the photos from the assembly process:
Final result
You can see it in action here (and half eaten):
The Interactive Smart Cake In Action - YouTube
Honestly, I had the best time in the world building this with Abigail. Let me know if you attempt to make one and can’t wait to see all the photos taken with your new smart machine.