The GarliBot Saga

The Idea

It started as a hare-brained money-making scheme ... involving cryptocurrency.
It was around January 2018, and the subreddit r/GarlicBreadMemes was the hottest thing on the internet. Our household made a nightly ritual of reading the latest spicy content from the subreddit.
An enterprising Reddit user undertook to create a cryptocurrency called GarliCoin for the subreddit, and the memeosphere exploded. I, of course, so opportunity. This was going to be the millennial generation's DogeCoin. The price would surely skyrocket due to the meme enthusiasm, before crashing and then slowly fading as enthusiasm died and people realized they had purchased something worthless. I was right, by the way.

I further hypothesized that the coin's maximum hypeage would be likely to coincide with the opening of trading on the major exchanges. This, after all would be the first time that rivers of dumb money would easily be able to pour in, and that sharks would be able to cash out. I wanted to be one of those sharks. However, in order to be a shark, I would need to accumulate a lot of GarliCoin before it hit the exchanges. Mining would be cost-prohibitive considering we already couldn't afford our electricity bills in SF.

My housemate Aubrey and I had been trying to work out how to become crypto billionaires for a while already, so I recruited him for the project. We arranged a phone call with some of the top minds of our generation. The result of our brainstorming session was the following master plan: Twitch makes Garlic Bread. I would create a robot that could make Garlic Bread, controlled by a computer. Aubrey would create a platform where users could "vote" on which action the robot should perform next by donating GarliCoin. For instance, if you wanted to turn on the oven, just send some coin to X address and if you wanted to add more cheese, send to Y address, etc. We would train a webcam on the robot so users could see their handiwork.

We hoped that coin enthusiasts, excited about the new currency that would be worth pretty much zero, and useless and not able to be sold on an exchange, would be happy to send us coin for entertainment. I thought it was a great idea.

In the end, Aubrey got too busy at work to build the platform (which was the much harder part of the project anyway), and I stayed up all night and created a robot. With no coin-control platform, it's just a machine that makes Garlic Bread that you control with your computer.

We had a party to "celebrate". Everyone came over and ate Garlic Bread. I was fun.

We accidentally invited a crypto venture capitaliist (our age) who perhaps thought that this was anything more than a joke, but they had fun with us anyway and we made a new friend.

The Design

Tool for adding cheese and garlic

There is a little servo in here that moves an inner piece of cardboard with a hole in it around. The hole can be positioned so that cheese, garlic, or nothing is dispensed. I hung it from the stove with my climbing gear and tape.

Hotplate

You can see the hot plate in the top image. We purchased an overpriced relay so I could turn the hot pad on or off with the Arduino. (In retrospect this whole project would maybe have been better suited for the Pi, but I didn't have one around at the time.) The relay was worth the price because I've used it for a lot of projects since, and I like that it comes with a safety case so I can just plug devices in like a power strip. It cuts down on the very real danger that would be me messing with household current.

LEDs

The LEDs were supposed to tell you when the internet people had decided it was time to eat the bread and put a new one in the pan...

Code

I threw all the code into a repo. It is not too complicated. I used Processing to send serial signals to the Arduino, which was eventually supposed to be replaced by the crypto-command platform. I wrote a little sweep-routine for the servo, nothing unusual, so that it didn't break the funnel apparatus.

Conclusion

This project was fun and hilarious, and destroyed my kitchen.