Author: tdelauro

This past week, I made some significant progress on the Arduino program used to control our sliding platform and peristaltic pumps. I was able to successfully select a drink from our phone application, have the pumps dispense the proper amount of each liquid needed to create that drink, and finally move the drink on the platform to our mixing station. I also spent some time with Aryan installing more shelfs in our wooden enclosure to house our breadboard and ELEGOO Mega.  Additionally, I prepared and presented for our team during the final project presentations in class this week.

Over the next 2 days, I’m planning on installing our mixing subsystem in our wooden enclosure and making any final touches we may need on the hardware side of things for our video due Monday night. I’ll be further planning and filming our video, polishing up our poster and will be performing some final testing once our subsystems are finally all integrated together.

This past week I worked with Aryan to construct the outer casing of our structure. We spent time measuring, cutting and connecting our structure, including installing the shelf to house our peristaltic pumps:

I also spent this week verifying that our remaining hardware components (stepper motor, servos, continuous rotation servo) are functioning properly. Aryan and I also spent timing preparing our parts to construct our sliding platform, including having our linear motion rods cut and building the platform for the glass.

I am still a bit behind on my deliverables. I will need to spend some time with Tyler in the next day or so to merge his progress on bluetooth communication to our Arduino code. I will also work with Aryan to build our sliding platform and stirring mechanism. Finally, I’ll be continuing to work on writing the final Arduino program to be uploaded to our ELEGOO.

This week I worked on testing all of the hardware components that arrived last week to ensure that they are not defected. I wrote some simple Arduino code to test the basic functionality of our servos, peristaltic pumps and stepper motors. Here’s a video displaying our peristaltic pumps dispensing water into 2 glasses:

We made a mistake in our last order and only ordered 2 bridge drivers for our pumps, so we’ll have to order at least 2 more to fully implement our design. Luckily, all of our parts appear to be functioning properly, so we shouldn’t have to place any more orders for replacement or missing parts aside from the bridge drivers.

This upcoming Sunday and Monday, I’ll be working with Tyler to build the basic mechanical structure for our design. We’ll also be constructing the liquid dispensing and pump submodule structure and plan on having this fully completed by class-time Wednesday.

Unfortunately, I was severely bottlenecked this past week due to us not receiving the rest of our order of supplies until this Thursday (3/24).  Our wood for our structure wasn’t ready to pick up until Thursday, and our remaining hardware components were not delivered until Thursday as well. Some of our key components, such as our DC barrel jack and 12V DC power supply were necessary to power all of the components we plan on using in our design. I spent the week working with both Aryan and Tyler on building the basic functionalities of our iOS application. We were able to develop and configure a majority of our login/sign-in page of our application, but I myself was not able to make much progress on my hardware and structural tasks.

Due to this, I am a bit behind on my deliverables for this week. We decided to use a new bluetooth module than the one we initially ordered (we decided to switch to the DSD Tech HM-10 because of the feedback we received from our Design Presentation). After researching the module a bit, we discovered this chip is able to more easily handle certain aspects of our iOS application, such as being able to seamlessly send notifications of completed drinks orders and drink status updates. Now that these components have arrived, I’m planning on getting our bluetooth chip configured with our iOS application and setting up the bluetooth communication with our iOS app next week. I will also be testing and writing our Arduino code to perform the tasks required to operate our system this week, including controlling our peristaltic pumps, stepper motor and servos.

This week I began making progress towards completing our design report. After going over the feedback from our design presentation and receiving our initial order of parts, I realized we had overlooked a few components.

• The DC power supply we ordered supplies 9V, but our peristaltic pumps require 12V. We also need a capacitor to connect the the power supply
• The DC power supply needs a DC barrel jack to connect to our breadboard
• I read through some example projects using the peristaltic pumps we order as well as the pump’s datasheet and both recommend using bridge drivers with the pumps

I’ll be working to get a new order ready by early next week, just in case we overlooked anything else.

I also updated our hardware diagram. It now shows all wire connections between components and shows exactly which components interface with one another.

Since the parts just arrive this Friday, I’m a bit behind on setting up some of the components, such as cutting/adding the tubing to the pumps. This upcoming week, I’ll be working to finalize our design report as well as starting to set up our hardware components.