Final Project Ideation

Preamble

Last winter I visited family in Avignon, France and found possibly the coolest boutique ever:

Jean le Gourmand, a Crêpe store

Granted, crêpe prices in America are exhorbitant (on the order of $10 per!!) but €1,50 is nothing to scoff at either, even for France. Best of all: there is no catch. The crêpes are really good, include toppings, and are actually quite large in size. So how do they manage this? Peek inside of Jean le Gourmand

Boom. Automatic crêpe machine. Well, semi-automatic; there is still a human flipping the crêpe and adding Nutella, but they've accomplished fast food (efficiency, cost) without (seemingly?) any of the down sides! I thought that was really cool, so, I'd like to base my final project around this business model.

Pitch 🛗🛫

MIT has no good breakfast options: no one has time for dining hall, vending machines sell over-priced junk, and as a non-east-coat-native, Dunkin is inhumane (I said what I said). Not only is it hard for us students to focus on an empty stomach, but the whale mating sounds that result from this are distracting for others, too.

So, I want to place an automatic crêpe machine in the middle of the Infinite, where students will be able to quickly (and cheaply!) purchase a delicious breakfast they can eat on their way to class. Or, if that fails, well I'll have a crêpe machine in my room 🤷🏽‍♂️

Some Research

So here's what we're working with:

• Manual
  • Crêpe Pan
• Semi-Automatic
  • Jean le Gourmand
  • Crêpe Robot Q
• Industrial
  • 0.2-2mm Automatic Crêpe Making Machine
• Pancakes
  • Popcake

Ok so the manual machine is what I have at home, and the semi-automatic options look quite good too. The problem is I have class in the mornings and would rather not have to man this machine. On the other hand, the completely automatic, "industrial" options don't look fit for human consuption. Oh, and it seems that making panckages is the easier variant of this problem so there's already a good solution for this. Still, a bit of research gives me good constraints and inspirations for my own design.

A few Constraints

These are meant to guide a hypothetical project with infinite time, resources and knowledge:

• Completely automatic: I don't want to be making crêpes by hand, that's been done for millenias now
  • The only exception is refilling batter and cleaning, which should be done on the order of every morning
• Not a lucrative business: Businesses profiting off students is getting really annoying
  • Crêpes should be priced about as much as they cost to make, maybe with some 20-30% markup to be safe
• Pipeline should (roughly) resemble what has been done traditionally
  • The industrial conveyor belt approach might boast 100s of crêpes an hour, but that doesn't feel human
  • Steps are very simple: spread batter, flip, add toppings, fold, serve

Sketches

Capture of my notebook as I was brainstorming this idea

I sketched out the pipeline for the machine to some reasonable amount of detail, then made a quick simulation in Blender. Hopefully either/or make sense... if not, tune-in thirteen weeks from now 😏