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Tyler’s Status Report 4/24

This past week I completed the Bluetooth connection between our iOS application and the DSD Tech HM-10 Bluetooth Module. It was difficult to manage, but now that the connection is established it will be easy to integrate with the rest of our system. The connection is established when the user orders a drink. Once the drink is ordered, the application sends a packet with the ordered drink to the HM-10, and the ELEGOO Mega is then able to act upon the information received.

This week I will be working on code for the ELEGOO Mega so it is able to move the drink to the correct locations and actually serve a drink ordered by the user. In addition, we will be finishing our structure and assembling the hardware and mechanical parts of the system.

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Team Status Report 4/24

We went ahead and decided to place a second order for additional peristaltic pumps. This purchase still leaves us well under our budget and the additional pumps will double the pouring rate of our liquids. Currently, our drink dispensing portion takes around 2 minutes, so these additional pumps will help speed up the dispensing process.

In addition, Bluetooth was completed this week. We now have a solid, established connection between our iOS application and the ELEGOO Mega. This will allow us to actually create drinks ordered by the user, all that remains to be coded is software that tells the moving platform to move and connecting the software with the mechanical and hardware components.

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Thomas’s Status Report 4/24

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.

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Aryan’s Status Report (04/10)

This week I worked on creating the UI as well as the functionality of the homepage wherein authenticated users are able to place the drink orders on the app. This homepage will process the orders using Bluetooth (which Tyler worked on implementing.) As well as this I also finalized the drinks data model page which stores essential information about every drink such as name, calories, alcohols, mixers, and overall drink rating.

 

Home Page UI with order buttons

In addition to this, in preparation for the demo next week I also reviewed and updated the Gant chart and communicated with both Tyler and Tom about the progress we have made and whether we are on track or not and the areas that we should push and prioritize more in order to meet all the deadlines required.

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Thomas’s Status report 4/10

This week we succeeded in making our first drink with our hardware!. I compiled a custom Arduino program that was able to create our drink order. At this point in our design process, I feel comfortable with controlling our peristaltic pumps. In addition, I’ve also done some some testing in terms of calculating  the flow rate for our pumps. After testing, I recorded that it takes out pumps approximately 1 minute to dispense 2 oz of liquid. We plan on ordering some more pumps to help speed up our drink making process, but are going to hold off on doing so until we’re sure our other components are functioning as expected in case we need to reorder additional parts.

Tomorrow, Tyler and I are planning on configuring our blue tooth in preparation for our interim demo this week. We plan to be able to send a drink request via our iOS application to create a drink, which will be dispensed via our peristaltic pumps. This upcoming week, I’ll be working on configuring our stepper motors and moving platform and hope to have the functionality of these components operating by next status report.

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Team Status Report 4/10

This week we worked on Bluetooth, ensured the peristaltic pumps work correctly, and enabled user login and signup on the application. We ran into some roadblocks setting up the Bluetooth connection but have a solid understanding of what needs to be done to finalize the setup. We were able to write Arduino code which enables us to pour drinks into a cup directly from liquid bottles. Additionally, enabled functionality for user login and signup directly from the app.

We also met to discuss and finalize the plans for the demo next week and in this process, we also updated our Gantt chart to reflect our progress and also track where we can improve.

In the coming week, we will finalize the Bluetooth connection initialization and work on the mechanical structure for our project. For our upcoming demo this week, we’re planning on having our Bluetooth communication functioning in order to successfully send and process a drink order.

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Tyler’s Status Report 4/10

This week I spent the great majority of my time working on the Bluetooth module in order to connect our iOS application with the ELEGOO Mega. This proved more difficult than expected due to the lack of documentation for our Bluetooth module. Since the version of Swift we are using is relatively new, there are few examples available to get a feel for the correct way of connecting our structures. In spite of this, solid progress was made towards setting up our Bluetooth connection.

This week I will be finalizing the Bluetooth connection and ensuring we are able to control our system with no hiccups. I will also be focusing on expanding the user interface for our application so users are able to order drinks directly from their phones. If time allows, I will begin to implement the queueing system to ensure user requests are ordered correctly and don’t get lost if the system is already in use.

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Aryan’s Status Report 4/3

This week I worked closely with Tyler to finish the fundamental implementation of the application. While Tyler worked on the UI and the navigation from screens, I was working on the database implementation and database modeling section. I had to read a lot of swift and Xcode documentation to understand how this works as I had no prior experience in using swift or  Xcode.

 

The database is Implemented with built-in SwiftUI features, and is native to Xcode and hence is much easier to integrate that third-party data bases such as my mySQL sqlLite. Overall I’m very happy with this week’s progress as these were the toughest stages in app development. The plan for the next week is to work on hard coding drinks data and ingredients data so as to create pages where users can choose a drink. Following this, our plan will be to integrate Bluetooth connectivity from app to robot in order for the user To be able to communicate with the robot.

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Team Status Report 4/3

This week we were able to work on both the hardware and software components of our project. Aryan and Tyler worked exclusively on the iOS application and were able to expand the number of pages to include a Home Page which is navigated to after clicking “Login” or “Sign Up”. This was a big accomplishment as it had been a difficult process finding out how to use buttons to view and update state, especially across files.

We also worked on creating and finishing the database model for the iOS application. We used SwiftUI is built in native database modeling And integrated it within the application. Since Tyler and Aryan Are both new to swift it was very difficult to complete this and a learning curve was quite steep. However, after reading a lot of the documentation we were able to finally finish the implementation. This database will be used to store user profiles as well as authentication details such as login and password. The user profile will consist of name age nickname, favorite drinks, calories consumed etc. This type of information will then be used to collate and create the monthly data inside reports that the app will present to the user

We were also to make significant progress on configuring our peristaltic pumps. Tyler and Thomas have set aside all of Sunday and Monday to build our mechanical foundation for our design as well as the structure for our liquids and peristaltic pumps.

In the upcoming week, we will explore the connection between our software and hardware components, as well as beginning to outline the design we would like our containing structure to have.

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Thomas’ Status Report 4/3

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.