Day 2: Electronic Food Peeler

This appeals only to the gadget lover in me and, alas, is not likely to be very practical.  It was, however, born out of a not too satisfying experience with the "traditional" tool for the job.  And no, I don't mean a hand-held peeler, but a hand-cranked peeler/corer/slicer.  My son and I used ours for the first time in pursuit of some Thanksgiving mashed potatoes.  I dutifully weighed out 3 pounds of potatoes as called for in the recipe.  I then used the device as pictured below.  Given the geometry of the potatoes, I first cut them in half.

It worked, but took a lot of peel off.  And I had to finish off the ends in each case.  When I was done, I looked at the amount of peel that I had lopped off and decided that I should reweigh.  It turned out that there was only 2 pounds left!  A full third of my potatoes had been lost to the peeling process.  There has to be a better way. There is, and it would be our second day's gadget.

One Step Beyond

My conception would be to have a single axis peeler set up in much the same way that the above is. The goal would be a peeler that would work both well with apples and potatoes (referred to as pommes for the rest of this discussion).  As a result, my device would connect to the pommes on both ends of the axis.  If it connects to the end with the corer/slicer module, the user would have to feed the spikes through the hole, but I think the added stability would be greatly worth it.  The process would be the following:

1. Decide up front if coring and slicing will be part of the activity.  If so, mount the plate to do these things.
2. Mount the pomme by connecting both ends.  
3. Close the box around the pomme for safety.
4. Select apple or potato.  
5. Press "Peel Now!"
6. The device starts out by spinning the pommes and scanning them.  The scanner would move axially down the pomme as it collected sufficiently detailed topological information to understand the bumps.
7. As the scanner is moving down the pomme, the knife follows in its wake.  The knife moves in an out according to the topological map of the pomme to ensure that it's putting just enough pressure (still spring mounted) to take off the skin, without putting undo pressure resulting in too much pomme lost.
8. When the device is done, it beeps or says, "You're pomme is ready!" (depending on which one you chose).
9. Open box and remove the pomme.

Two Steps Beyond

Here are some additional improvements that could be made:

• Multiple peeling attachments for different fruit.  Potatoes and apples likely would require a different peel.  Cucumbers, too.
• Along with multiple peeling attachements, you could enable axial, instead of just circumferential, peeling.  Cucumbers are typically peeled exclusively like this.  Would likely require a substantial upgrade to the motor output and control of the peeler.
• Enable a spinning peeler for rinding of oranges.  Perhaps skinning of tomatoes.  Not sure what else.