Mr. Burrito

Mr. Burrito in action

Inspiration

Meeting our team member Charles and his accompanying burrito addiction and our own stupidity.

What it does

Mr. Burrito is a lean mean non-FDA approved burrito making machine. He takes a steamy tortilla and whatever burrito innards you desire, and with the press of a button and several motor actuations and delays makes you a precision folded burrito. (emphasis on precision not accuracy)

How we built it

We built this on a poorly constructed frame of 80-20 and MDF. we had to research the best way to fold a burrito so that we could match the motion of human hands using mechanical parts. We found that using flippers on 3 sides of the tortilla was the easiest way to fold it into shape. the first 3 flippers run on stepper motors, the trap door for the food (in an acrylic box raised above where the tortilla is placed) is run by servo and the last flipper is run on a dc motor. Basically each motor runs on a timer from the arduino to flip in the right order.

Challenges we ran into

Too many to count. The main problem through the beginning stages of the project was that rolling a burrito without your hands is really, really hard. Once we got the first 3 flips to fold it in half and fold the sides, we tried so many different options for the final roll, moving nets/belts, spinning wheels or rollers, combinations thereof. We settled on a fourth flipper with the burrito crunched up against a block. Interferences left and right. frying electronics. We are using so many actuators (5 motors), that the power supplies didn't have enough power and we had to add in batteries. Food spilling out of the trap door. Trying to use pressure sensors for compliant flippers (they flip until the arduino reads a certain pressure), which took too much time and didn't work as well (rip the takk strips)