I like to cook very minimal meals and found myself eating the same things over and over: rice, beans, pasta, steamed vegetables. Pretty basic, but also healthy. Anyway, as a natural side effect of being a programmer, I thought abstractly about how all these things are prepared and realized they’re roughly all the same:
- Measure dry ingredients
- Measure water
Then either:
- Boil the water
- Add ingredients
or
- Rinse ingredients in water
- Add ingredients and water together and then boil
Pretty much the same thing over and over again. Why not automate it?
The overall idea is to control the boiling with a hot plate on a timer via an arduino or raspberry pi
and dispense the ingredients via a predetermined number of rotations of one of these:
You’d also need a pump to control the water, and a couple of motors with multiple containers to rinse the ingredients and to mix them if needed.
You could then hookup a web server to it and control it remotely, for example, starting it when you leave work and have the ingredients of a meal waiting for you when you get home!
It would definitely be a lot of effort, but I imagine some industrial individuals could make a self contained appliance that works for any water-plus-ingredients food.