Daft Punk Animatronic Cake

Shakar Bakery created the first ever animated Daft Punk cake that moves to their newest single " Get Lucky". It is 5ftx3ftx5ft! The motion was designed using Arduino boards and servos. Aside from the main structure, everything on this cake is edible. the helmets were sculpted out of rice krispies treats, and the torsos out of cake! The LEDs and the helmet shields are not edible. Everything else is fondant! Yes it's a cake you can eat! The Daft Punk members move to their new Get Lucky single!

The song in our video belongs to Daft Punk and we do not hold nor claim any rights to it! this project was solely for fun, and we would love to hear from the French Duo to know their thoughts!

Read more about ithttp://shakarbakery.com/daft-punk-cake/

Step 1: The Sketch

This sketch shows where I would lay out the cake boards, what would be rice krispies and what would be cake! This took about 3 hours to design

Step 2: Edible Helmets

I decided to sculpt the helmets out of rice krispies treats to keep it light (that didn’t really work well. The heads ended up weighing 6-8 pounds). We used a coffee can as a base because originally we were going to house all the electronics in there (looking back while writing this blog really makes me laugh at how naive we were with everything!) Obviously that didn’t happen- we eventually realized we would need access to the electronics so we decied to house them underneath the DJ board.

Step 3:

Here are the first prototypes for the helmet articulation structures:

Step 4:

We eventually used a lazy susan bearing for the “yes” motion because it could support up to 300 pounds of weight and reduce strain on the motor.

Step 5:

The mechanical redesign and a much beefer servo motor for the silver helmet

Step 6:

Here is a picture of my initial DJ Board and you can see my structure for the DP members. I say initial board because I first built it out of foam board and then painted it black with non-toxic paint. Well, I learned that when you paint foam board it warps. SO after spending 4 hours building the DJ board, I had to destroy it and rebuild it- this time I used MDF and my wonderful Dad helped me put it together with power tools. So initial picture:

Step 7:

This part was really tricky because we had to feed all the cables from the helmet to the base bottom. It took a lot of coordination on both our parts to complete the cake! Here are some screen shots

Step 8:

Since I was making the cake for fun, I opted to make one of the robots out of cake dummies so that I wouldn’t waste cake! If this were a real commissioned order, this cake would’ve fed 100 people.

Step 9:

A photo of how I layered the real cake. Again, I used one tier of cake dummy to save cake. I fed 60 people with the real cake!!! Also, I removed the layer of rice krispies, I was experimenting in this photo.

Step 10:

This project took 2 months to design, over 100 hours to build the structure and another 100 hours spent on the electronics, programming, and mechanics . We had a lot of bumps in the road and we worked through every single one. This was the first time I ever built a cake structure, the first time I sculpted with rice krispies, and the first time I built a cake on such a massive scale! This was the first time coding an Arduino servo, and creating head motions that defied weight restraints! I have to admit that we did a last minute surgery to the silver helmet to make the “no” motion more fluid.