This week, I worked mainly on getting the design slides together, and I worked a little on the report aspect as well (see the design slides on the website once they are uploaded, sometime in the next day or so). Outside of the slides, I also talked with my team and we made the final decision on a lot of parts on which we were still wavering. We officially decided to use stepper motors for our strainers, instead of the linear actuator or screw motors we had previously discussed. We also made an official decision on the touch screen (7 inch LCD IPS capacitive touch screen) and the camera (8MP IMX219-77 camera) on which we want to use to interface with the Jetson Nano. We also ordered the majority of ingredients, and I have sent the touch screen, stepper motors/Arduino, and LEDs to my residence, since that is my area of focus. I expect all of those to arrive this weekend, so I will have the next week to try to use them. Lastly, I did a lot of research into how long all of the ingredients we will use in our hot pot takes to cook, and make the database from that. From my research, I learned that the meat will only take around 30 seconds, the fish balls, bok choy, and mushrooms, will take 2-3 minutes, and the tofu will only take 1-2 minutes. For the ingredients that have a range in cook time, I started by just choosing the middle value, and then once we start doing user testing, we can adjust the times if needed.
I believe that our project is still on schedule. We set up the first few weeks to do design, and this next week once we get the parts ordered, we can actually start building them. Also, since we knew we had the design report due this week, we didn’t give ourselves too much other things to do, since we wanted to do well on the report.
This next week, I expect I will start to play with the Arduino and how it interfaces with the motors and LEDs. One thing we want to have is different LED stages that correspond to different strainer states, so I will work on figuring out how to make the LEDs do what we want. I will also work on connecting the motors to the Arduino, and writing code to make them run. I will also look into exactly what software we need on the Arduino, and making sure that is installed and working so that when it’s time to integrate with the CV, the integration goes as smooth as possible.