I did this project with 2 of my friends, Vaughn Khouri and John Xu, for the Formlabs IAP Hackathon in January 2025. Our goal was to design and build an injection molding machine - but for pancakes. Completed in under 48 hours, our machine injected pancake batter in a Benchy mold, heated the mold, and automatically ejected the pancake Benchy onto a plate.

I was responsible for the electronics and firmware development for this project.

The aluminum mold was heated with several PTC heating elements, and both halves were actuated by stepper-controlled ball screws. A third stepper motor controlled batter injection.

cad CAD miters Working in MITERS miters

Our microcontroller was a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W, running a state machine that handled all stepper motors, relays to control the 120VAC PTC heaters, limit switches for calibration, and temperature sensing (which we ultimately didn’t use).

miters miters demo

In the last 12 hours, we realized we could use an solenoid and compressed air to eject the pancake out the mold instead of ejection pins in a standard injection molding machine. It made for quite an exciting ending to our print :D

After just a bit of tuning with batter volume and heating time, we were able to get it working! At the end of the day, we were holding the world’s first pancake Benchy.

operation benchy world’s first pancake benchy benchy benchy

Witness our live reactions to the first successful print!:

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