The automatic machine for hot pot. Photo: screenshot of the video posted by Vista

A primary school student in Southwest China's Sichuan Province has invented a machine, which can delicately cook tripe that is served with a hot pot meal.

The boy, surnamed Zhou, lives in Chengdu, where people are crazy about sharing a hot pot meal that is served with different kinds of seafood, vegetables and cuts of meat, one of which is tripe.

Hot pot lovers know a strip of raw tripe is to be held by chopsticks and given only a few waves through the boiling spicy soup, and not simply dropped in the pot like some other ingredients.

Aficionados say this method of cooking the bovine intestine delicacy tastes better but many gourmands say it's too much work and lose patience.

Zhou's automatic tripe-cooking machine consists of three parts; a box that sits on the table that controls a fishing-rod like stick that bobs up and down over the boiling hot pot, to which a string is attached, and a clamp is attached. 

Zhou's demonstration in a video posted by Vista Video shows him clamping some tripe to the string, which then gently swirls the meat in the broth by the exactly prescribed eight times before popping up and ready to eat. 

Like all good inventors, Zhou and his father made multiple models before perfecting the machine.

The video has been viewed more than 150 million times on Sina Weibo as of press time.

"The spirit of innovation is worth encouraging though the invention is not perfect," one of Weibo users wrote.

Some netizens gave the inventor some useful advice to improve his machine. "You can change the string to a slotted spoon," one of them wrote.