What is The Sprinkle Machine?
One of many #olinprojects. It is a CNC Machine that decorates cakes using confectionery sprinkles based on a digital pictorial input.
We created this blog to record our development and reflect on our progress, based our class’s scrum approach. Because each sprint is around two weeks long, we will be updating this blog every other week. Be sure to follow our Sprinkle Machine publication in Medium for more updates!
Now you know why we’re doing this, let me explain how we came up with this idea.
Why Are We Building a Sprinkle Machine?
At first, our team was called Team Slytherin because we wanted to make an autonomous quadcopter that could act like the snitch in the Harry Potter books. However, when we ran this idea by our classes’ ninjas (which are Olin-style T.A.s) and by our professors, they thought this idea was over scoped for an 8 week project. We then decided to brainstorm new solutions. We started by having each team member put post-it notes with all of their ideas from a five minute ideation session onto a poster and comparing them. The team decided to meet later to catch up and decide on an idea. In the meantime, Liv stayed behind and spoke to professor Daniela and came up with a few more Harry Potter based ideas.
In preparation for our meeting, team members translated the ideas from the poster into cards on the website trello.com. When we got together we chose our ideas by voting on our favorite cards. Our ideas ranged from a baby seat sensing system, to a personalized tea brewer, to the chess set from The Sorcerers’ Stone in the Harry Potter series. After careful consideration between our top ideas, we chose the Sprinkle Picture Maker because it is feasible, sufficiently difficult, and edible. The rest of the blog posts show how we progressed with this idea.
Who Are We?
We’re Team SprinkOlin, and we love to make bad puns with our name. We are part of Olin’s class of 2019. We have a diverse group of engineers: Anne Ku (me!) and Ariana Olson are in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Lydia Zuehsow and Justin Kunimune are in Robotic Engineering, and Liv Kelley is in Biological Engineering. We came together for this project is for our Principles of Engineering class, where we develop a mechatronic system that involves electrical, mechanical, and software components for our final project.
