Smart table, dumb waiter
Hobnobbing with friends? No need to get caught up in the kitchen when you can have food to go
“There are two things our local residents’ meetings take seriously: access to driveways and access to refreshments,” says Sybil Dudee. “But we can’t all reach the coffee table and I can’t vote on cycle paths when I’m busy peddling cheese to my peers. I need the hostessing equivalent of a dropped kerb.”
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We don’t give much thought to coffee tables, they’re just, well, part of the furniture. Yet they sit in the uncanny valley of serving space: not big enough to sit at like a dinner table, not small enough to put on your lap like a dinner tray. Perhaps there’s a third way to ensure everyone gets a snack: bring the table to them.
I started with the ubiquitous Ikea Lack – the Times New Roman of coffee tables. It is ideal: lightweight and designed (and priced) for DIY.
I gutted a children’s ride-on electric car, and fixed the axles to the table legs. I left the comically large wheels attached for their aesthetic charm.
The hefty motor can ferry snacks up to the weight of an average 3-year-old – that should be more than enough biscuits for everyone.
To give the table brains enough to navigate the room, I spliced a programmable Arduino into the circuitry. I then added optical sensors that let the robo-table see sharp transitions between different colours and so follow a line.
Black tape on the light tiles in my bathroom worked well. But that’s not normally where I serve refreshments. The edge of a rug placed in my living room proved less than eye-catching for my robo-table. Whenever it lost sight of the line, it wiggled back and forth hunting for it, scattering snacks as though planting a field of M&M’s.
To save snacks, I switched to a preprogrammed route to get my table to bus food around the room, although like many bus routes, the schedule could be a little erratic. By the third circuit of the room, robo-table had drifted perilously close to a pot-plant collision. No matter – the battery will probably die before that happens.
Some were less impressed. I had just got started on a “return to kitchen” refuelling button, when my housemate remarked it would be less effort to just put a bowl of crisps on the Roomba.
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