This Custom Pancake Printer Is an Engineering Marvel

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It's basically a scientific fact that pancakes painstakingly shaped like Mickey Mouse, or stars, or letters spelling out your name taste 1,000% better than boring, circular pancakes. That's why a new pancake printing machine -- with the ability to make custom pancakes designed on a computer -- is an engineering marvel, if not a breakfast miracle. 

The pancake printer, dubbed the "Pancake CNC Machine" by its creators, was designed by a group of students at Olin College of Engineering outside of Boston, according to a report by The Boston Globe. As demonstrated in the video above, the machine takes images designed on a computer -- like a sailboat -- and prints them out as pancakes onto a griddle with incredible precision. The genius device, which the students designed for their Principles of Engineering class, took nine weeks to finish and a small budget of just $250 to produce. Oh, and as you can imagine, it involved eating a crapload of pancakes. 

"You can make anything: cartoon characters, geometric shapes, a yin yang symbol," Trent Dye, one of the students, told the paper. Needless to say, they probably nailed the assignment. However, unlike the PancakeBot 3D printer that surged in popularity on Kickstarter last year, it looks like the Pancake CNC Machine isn't destined to end up mass-produced and sold on the shelves of Bed Bath & Beyond, unfortunately. So, in the end, we'll just have to settle for our basic pancakes that -- if we're lucky -- look like circles. 

click to play video

h/t Eater

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Tony Merevick is Cities News Editor at Thrillist and would easily make pancakes every damn day if he had this thing. Send news tips to news@thrillist.com and follow him on Twitter @tonymerevick.