Toast Printer Prints Tasty Images And Weather Forecasts

Electrical Engineering degrees usually focus on teaching you useful things, like how to make electronic devices that actually work and that won’t kill you. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have some fun on the way. Which is what Cornell students [Michael Xiao] and [Katie Bradford] decided to do with T.O.A.S.T: The Original Artistic Solution for Toast. In case the name didn’t give it away, this is a toast printer. The user supplies an image and a bit of bread, and the T.O.A.S.T prints the image onto the toast. Alternatively, the printer can show you the weather by printing a forecast onto your daily bread.

[Xiao] and [Bradford] programmed a Raspberry Pi W to handle most of the heavy lifting, converting the image or the weather forecast into a 10 by 10 matrix, which is then sent to the PIC32. This drives two motors that move a heat gun. To turn a 1 in this matrix into a toasted spot, the motors pause over one spot of the bread, creating a nice toasty spot. The whole thing is mounted onto a laser-cut frame, with a 3D printed holder for the heat gun. There is, unfortunately, no butter or jam dispenser, but if you were to combine this with the Toast-Bot, you might get the finished product. That might be a postgraduate level build, though.