14 DAY TRIAL // MooBella showed off an interesting device, recently at a DEMO event in Colorado. It's an ice cream vending machine running a linux 2.4 kernel. The machine has a 15" LCD touchscreen interface. It can be stocked with up to two "base mixes", twelve flavor mixes and three dry-ingredient mix-ins, for a total of 96 varieties, and it makes real ice cream. The company says that in 45 seconds, a quantity of base mix is precisely measured and pumped, aerated, flavored, and sprayed onto a flat rotating surface, where it is frozen. It is then scraped up by a tiny plow, formed into a cylinder, and dispensed into a paper cup.
Linux comes in to make all this happen. Although the machine's subsystems are controlled by simple electronics, the brain is a Linux system running on an AMD 2600 processor, with 512MB of RAM and a 40GB hard-drive.
The ice cream machine also sports two types of wireless interfaces. The first is used in the machine's network of temperature sensors. The second is a satellite-based wireless interface, provided by Cantalope, and used to access the machine remotely. It also has a RJ-45 (ethernet) port. "With a crossover and password, you can drill into the machine, download data, manipulate inventory, change the way the machine processes things, or do software upgrades in the field. If the machine is on the Internet, i can do the same things from my desk," says Jim Baxter, VP of Engineering.
The project evolved from a typical embedded development up to a point when they say they needed more power. "That's when Linux rose to the top. That's part of the innovation that led to this."