A Robot That Spears Tomatoes Out of Salads

Everyone knows that lettuce is just a delivery vessel for salad dressing, chicken, and croutons. Silly stuff like tomatoes are to be…

Cameron Coward
5 years ago3D Printing

Everyone knows that lettuce is just a delivery vessel for salad dressing, chicken, and croutons. Silly stuff like tomatoes are to be immediately thrown out. But what are you going to do, pick tomatoes out of your own salad every time? That’s menial labor fit only for peasants. Well, peasants and robots, as YouTuber Michael Reeves proves in his latest video.

You may remember Reeves from one of our recent posts where we talked about a few of his projects, including a literal hot glue gun. For his most recent project, Reeves has invented a robot that spears tomatoes in order to make his salads more palatable. The robot started its life as a 3D printer, which was converted to perform its new task as an automated tomato-removal tool.

The conversion process really only required one major step, which was to replace the extruder and hot end with a pneumatic spear. Reeves also added a webcam that looks down onto the printer’s build platform. The feed video is used with a computer vision object tracking system that Reeves programmed in Microsoft Visual Studio Code.

That computer vision system is able to identify the tomatoes, and sends their location to the 3D printer-turned-robot. That then moves the pneumatic spear gun over the tomato. The printer’s fan control was repurposed to trigger the spear, so a simple G-code command will set it off, skewering the tomato. It should go without saying, but don’t build this yourself — it’s dangerous. But, it is also very entertaining.

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist.
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