The GarliBot Saga

The Idea

It started as a hare-brained money-making scheme … involving cryptocurrency.

It was around January 2018, and the subreddit r/GarlicBreadMemes was the hottest thing on the internet. Our household made a nightly ritual of reading the latest spicy content from it. An enterprising Reddit user undertook to create a cryptocurrency called GarliCoin for the subreddit, and the memeosphere exploded. I, of course, saw opportunity. This was going to be the millennial generation's DogeCoin. The price would surely skyrocket on meme enthusiasm, before crashing and then slowly fading as enthusiasm died and people realized they had purchased something worthless. I was right, by the way.

I further hypothesized that the coin's maximum hypeage would likely coincide with the opening of trading on the major exchanges. This, after all, would be the first time that rivers of dumb money would easily be able to pour in, and that sharks would be able to cash out. I wanted to be one of those sharks. However, to be a shark I would need to accumulate a lot of GarliCoin before it hit the exchanges. Mining would be cost-prohibitive, considering we already couldn't afford our electricity bills in SF.

My housemate Aubrey and I had been trying to work out how to become crypto billionaires for a while already, so I recruited him for the project. We arranged a phone call with some of the top minds of our generation. The result of our brainstorming session was the following master plan: Twitch makes Garlic Bread. I would create a robot that could make Garlic Bread, controlled by a computer. Aubrey would create a platform where users could "vote" on which action the robot should perform next by donating GarliCoin. If you wanted to turn on the oven, just send some coin to X address; if you wanted to add more cheese, send to Y address, and so on. We would train a webcam on the robot so users could see their handiwork.

We hoped that coin enthusiasts — excited about a new currency that would be worth pretty much zero, useless, and unable to be sold on an exchange — would be happy to send us coin for entertainment. I thought it was a great idea.

In the end, Aubrey got too busy at work to build the platform (which was the much harder part of the project anyway), and I stayed up all night and created a robot. With no coin-control platform, it's just a machine that makes Garlic Bread that you control with your computer.

We had a party to "celebrate." Everyone came over and ate Garlic Bread. It was fun.

We accidentally invited a crypto venture capitalist (our age) who perhaps thought this was anything more than a joke, but they had fun with us anyway and we made a new friend.

The Design

Tool for adding cheese and garlic

There is a little servo in here that moves an inner piece of cardboard with a hole in it. The hole can be positioned so that cheese, garlic, or nothing is dispensed. I hung it from the stove with my climbing gear and tape.

Hotplate

We purchased an overpriced relay so I could turn the hot pad on or off with the Arduino. (In retrospect this whole project would maybe have been better suited for the Pi, but I didn't have one around at the time.) The relay was worth the price because I've used it for a lot of projects since, and I like that it comes with a safety case so I can just plug devices in like a power strip. It cuts down on the very real danger that would be me messing with household current.

LEDs

The LEDs were supposed to tell you when the internet people had decided it was time to eat the bread and put a new one in the pan…

Code

I threw all the code into a repo. It is not too complicated. I used Processing to send serial signals to the Arduino, which was eventually supposed to be replaced by the crypto-command platform. I wrote a little sweep routine for the servo, nothing unusual, so that it didn't break the funnel apparatus.

Conclusion

This project was fun and hilarious, and destroyed my kitchen.