This Machine Eliminates Cereal:Milk Ratio Mistakes
Do you struggle to achieve the perfect cereal to milk ratio when preparing your morning breakfast? This machine could help.
I’m willing to bet that you hold strong opinions about a few specific things, like the correct thermostat setting in your home and the ideal temperature for a steak. Among those high-emotion topics is the classic breakfast controversy: the proper milk to cereal ratio. And while I’m not prepared to start a war by declaring my opinion on that, I can show you this machine built by Engineering Dads that fills a bowl at the user’s desired ratio every time.
The goal here was to dispense a desired amount of breakfast cereal and then dispense the right amount of milk to achieve the ratio preferred by the user. Yes, this does pour the cereal first and, no, we aren’t going to discuss the merits of a milk-first serve (that’s criminal).
The major challenge was dispensing the cereal, as the user’s hunger may vary and cereal comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. A small bowl of Berry Berry Kix won’t pour anything like Lucky Charms S’mores or Kit Kat cereal. Engineering Dads had to come up with a way to reliably dispense a variety of cereal types, while also integrating a method to measure the amount poured in order to pump the corresponding volume of milk.
They settled on the simplest solution: a big 3D-printed hopper with a sliding door in front of the output chute. Lifting that door allows some cereal to fall into the bowl waiting below. Lifting the door even further causes more cereal to come tumbling out. Before lifting the door, the user can place a photoresistor sensor in the hole that matches the amount of cereal they want. When the door reaches that point, it blocks the light.
An Arduino Uno Rev3 board monitors the photoresistor and detects the lack of light. When that happens, it turns on the motor of a submersible pump to start dispensing milk. The amount is crucial to achieving that perfect milk to cereal ratio, so the user can fine-tune it using a potentiometer dial. The Arduino checks the value of that potentiometer and that’s how it determines the length of time to run the pump.
This machine does require that you leave cereal in the hopper and a jug of milk sitting next to it. And there are several food safety concerns, from the pump to the 3D-printed parts. But surely, you’ll be willing to ignore those trivialities once you taste cereal with exactly the right amount of milk.
