Handle With Linux

I love ice, and now I love it even more. Linux can make you coffee, wash your clothes, heat your meal and it can also serve you a delicious fresh made Ice Cream.

This is MooBella a Ice Machine creating your ice cream while you wait, in less than a minute it serves you your Ice Cream and they claim it's better than Häagen-Dazs. The machine runs Linux, which makes it even more interesting. It would be great if they could supply us with a mini version of this beauty for at home.

MooBella is revolutionizing the ice-cream on-demand sector. Their vending machines air-up, fl
avor, and flash-freeze the room-temperature ingredients to custom-create and serve fresh scoops of ice cream.

The MooBella is build around off-the-shelf pc hardware and it runs red-hat linux, even it user interface is based on a firefox browser. This is a great example of what Linux can do for innovation (and for great ice cream!)

MooBella® lets you make your own ice cream – with up to 96 different varieties. The MooBella® Ice Creamery can accommodate up to 12 flavors, 3 mix-ins and 2 different ice cream types (Premium and Light) at any given time. New flavors, mix-ins and ice cream types will be introduced periodically, so there will always be the opportunity to make something new and different.

As of lately, the MooBella can actually be spotted in the wild. (if you're in New England that is)

The machine has a wireless satellite connection available so it can be remotely managed, one more reason for wanting one at home

The machine has a 15-inch flat-panel touchscreen interface.

On demand the base mix is precisely measured and pumped, aerated, flavored, and sprayed onto a flat rotating surface, where it is flash frozen. The Ice is then scraped up, formed into a cylinder, and dispensed into a paper cup.

MooBella doesn't serve soft-ice but creates real ice cream, in less than a minute. The machine uses MooBella's proprietary formulas for ice, which are packaged using "bag-in-a-box" technology that requires no refrigeration until the bags are opened.

Here's a promotional video, just replace the word "innovation" by "Linux" and it's a great promotion ;-)

This one shows the machine at work, and some bla,bla.

More info at MooBella

update: apparently this machine no longer runs Linux, sadly they moved away to WinXP

blogrol is here