Designer Miguel Valenzuela was clearly going for dad-of-the-year when he created this masterpiece. The bot will ship to Kickstarter backers in July 2015.

How do you make pancakes more amazing? That’s easy. You create a robot that can 3-D print any shape you want into pancakes. That’s the journey that designer Miguel Valenzuela first embarked upon about four years ago, reports FastCoExist. In a move that the kid in all of us can appreciate, he used Legos to make his first PancakeBot prototype.

Valenzuela’s two young daughters were the ones who inspired him to make the PancakeBot in the first place. He told FastCoExist:

“It took a while to develop the final prototype, but the girls were supportive throughout the project. When they saw the final result of being able to make Mickey Mouse pancakes with Lego PancakeBot, the first version, they were ecstatic.”

So Valenzuela kept refining his design, and made videos along the way.

Now Valenzuela is ready to put the PancakeBot into production, and has a Kickstarter campaign that’s fully funded almost twice with 29 days left to go. The video does what a good Kickstarter video should do: It tells you everything you want to know about the project.

How Does It Work?

The process looks very simple and user-friendly. Using included software, you simply trace the outline of whatever image you want to turn into pancakes, then hit “Print” and watch the printer create your pancake in real time.

The most important thing to remember is that the pancake batter pen will draw lines in the order you create them in the software. Since the pancake printing process involves the batter dropping onto the griddle in that same order, the first lines down will be the darkest. Once you realize that, you can draw anything you want. You can even use food coloring in separate bottles of batter to create full-color pancake creations!

Valenzuela estimates that the finished PancakeBots will ship to Kickstarter backers in July 2015. The included software will be both Mac- and Windows-compatible, and will also come with some pre-loaded pancake designs to get you started.

PancakeBot’s promotional tagline is, “If you like Pancakes and Robots, you’ll love PancakeBot.” We just wonder what kind of fun-hating jerk doesn’t like pancakes and robots. We’d definitely love to have some Vik-shaped pancakes for breakfast.

[via FastCoExist, Kickstarter]

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