World’s First Cheeseburger Robot

World's first cheeseburger robot was built using BeagleBone Black

Posted by Jason Kridner on 2023-08-31T12:40:08-04:00

Learn about how the world’s first cheeseburger robot was built in Make Magazine Article: How They Made: World’s First Cheeseburger Robot and why it was built using BeagleBone Black.

From the article:

Massively Embedded Computing

Presumably this giant burger beast is stuffed with microcontrollers? Not anymore.

“Initially we used a lot of Microchip PIC microcontrollers, but that was making it more difficult to be modular, to iterate, to debug,” says Alex.

“Now it’s got 20 computers in it,” Jeff says. “We’re using mostly BeagleBone Blacks, and it’s all Linux, off-the-shelf Ubuntu. Unlike most embedded design for mass manufacture, we didn’t have the same cost and space constraints, so it’s faster to use Linux throughout, and much easier to work with the mechanical engineers; we don’t have to translate down to 8-bit microcontrollers.”

Creator relies heavily on open source software for robot communications (Apache Thrift and libserial, curlpp, and Boost.Signals2 libraries) and for development (Docker, Eclipse CDT, CMake, gtest, Jenkins, React Native, and Atom). And like a lot of makers on a budget, they still design circuits in EagleCAD (and these days, Altium) and order their purple prototype boards from OSH Park.

Learn more about why in Jeff’s talk to Stanford graduate students.

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