This littleBits contraption makes a mean glass of buttermilk.
Rather than with a cup ‘o joe, Maker Milind Sonavane kicks off every day with some freshly churned buttermilk for breakfast. As you can imagine, making buttermilk can certainly be a time consuming process, so Sonavane decided to build an automated ButterBot to simplify his morning routine.
“The Indian way of making buttermilk involves churning curd to and fro to get the fat out as butter, and leave the liquid behind as buttermilk. This is usually done with a wooden stirrer and a rope wrapped around it – tugging on either ends of the rope makes the stirrer churn the life out of the fat,” our friends at littleBits write.
The ButterBot expedites this process using an ATtiny25 powered servo motor, along with a cloudBit module to handle the time-bound automation.
“We didn’t want to get into the complexities of gearing and wanted the device have an earthy feel to it. So we got two plates of wood turned on a lathe, used one as a plate for the servo motor, the other as a holder for the churner, held the two together with a piece of laser cut acrylic and connected the motion with a piece of red twine,” Sonavane explains.
How it works is super easy. Every morning at 8am, an IFTTT recipe tells the cloudBit to activate the tinyAVR based servo which moves the rope to and fro, churning the buttermilk for 20 minutes straight. The milk then sits for five minutes as the butter rises. At 8:30, when the buttermilk is ready, another IFTTT recipe turns the ButterBot off. Once completed, Makers can add milk to the bowl and leave the curd to set for the next day.
Looking to jumpstart your morning with buttermilk? You’ll have to check out Sonavane’s entire build here.
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