Mechanical Design
This week was machine week! As a group, our class decided to make a smart bar for our lab/school. We were initially thinking of making a drink dispenser that would give users the options of flavors, carbonation, and other customizable functions, but after some group meetings, we decided this was too much and simply settled on a smart bar that would pump different drinks out of a fridge and have a display panel where users could choose their drink and amount. Since our node was made up of a pretty large group of people, we decided to split up into different groups, and assign different people in the group tasks. Our whole node decided that we would have 3 main groups, one for the plumbing aspects of our machine, another for design, and a third for the electronics. Brandon, Emma, and Rushil were in the design group. John, David, Jesse, and Kevin were in the plumbing group, and Tuna, Jacob, Elizabeth, Whitney, and I were in the electronics group. In our large meetings, we decided that the outer portion of our bar would be made during machine week so we wouldn't need to buy wood. We would get a faucet to dispense the drinks and have the Wheaton W logo on the front of the bar itself. For the plumbing portion, there was a bunch that we needed to buy. We needed tubing, a pump, solenoids, valves, tanks for our drinks, mosfets, and wires to attach to the electronics. The design team and electronics team collaborated in deciding on adding neopixels to the bottom of the bar and on the inside of the W cutout in the front of the bar. The electronics group would make a user interfece using a raspberry pi, deal with the neopixels, and add a speaker function that could play songs when the counter portion of the bar was knocked. This design and planning portion of our project was done in large group meetings and discussions, which I was a part of.