After Wine Now Linux Serves Ice Cream [Video]

I won’t be surprised if you all Linux fans declare today as a national holiday after reading this news. But it is so awesome that I couldn’t  stop myself from sharing it. I love ice cream, 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!

MooBella On-demand Ice Cream Maker

The MooBella is a Linux-powered ice cream maker currently being tested in New England. It’s not small enough to use at home, but the ice cream is reportedly pretty tasty.

Apparently MooBella has put Linux to work making ice cream, in a vending machine that Wallace and Gromit would be proud of. The brain of the MooBella uses Red Hat running on pretty basic off-the-shelf hardware to make 96 varieties of ice cream, on demand, in about 45 seconds per precisely-measured serving. It has a wireless connection for remote maintenance, and you order your ice cream on a 15″ touch screen.

But where does Linux come in? VP of Engineering Jim Baxter explains, “When I began the project five years ago, it was a typical embedded project, written in C++, and very restrictive. Later, we realized that number one, the system needed to be modular; and two, we need a lot more horsepower to drive all the things we need to do. That’s when Linux rose to the top. That’s part of the innovation that led to this.“

And why Linux? Baxter says MooBella chose Linux because of its connectivity power, and because of its open source nature. “It’s a very powerful system, and there are a lot of people doing innovation in the Linux environment,” he said

Watch Linux Powered Ice Cream Vending Machine in Action

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