Saucebot Facts - PancakeLegend/SauceBot GitHub Wiki

We first started talking about it as a gag, but built it because it was a fun challenge.

• Pushing mustard through a tube is a non-trivial thing. The pumps are peristaltic and of our own design, built entirely at our hackerspace with only a few bucks worth of materials. It went through several rounds of iteration and is very reliable now. The plans for the pump are freely available... it's open sauce.

• Yes, we repurposed a Mk1 Prusa i3 3D printer for the X/Y platform just because that was a pragmatic approach.

It was designed and built before COVID was a thing, but it is inherently more hygienic than letting randos touch squeeze bottles. It's understandable that people might think it was a reaction to a public health issue, but that's just a coincidence. Post covid lockdown and until June 2022 patrons weren't allowed to push the buttons, but that ruling has become more permissive - we clean the buttons regularly.

The food-grade silicon sauce tubes are replaced with fresh tube before each outing.

People seem to really love it in person, more than you know. We love seeing their reactions, it's quite fulfilling.

Saucebot ruled a day on Reddit at the top of both r/Australia and r/ShittyRobots for a full 24 hours. This was Saucebot's proudest day.

If you hit both buttons at once it will do whichever registered first.

• You can hit the button 10 times if you really want, we don't care, but that would be an awful lot of sauce. It's a little over-generous with how much it dispenses in a cycle.

Saucebot is a fantastic way to explain the kinds of things we do at our hackerspace which can otherwise be quite tricky to do in 10 seconds or less.