Assignment 1 - Principles and Practices

First Ideas for the final project

  • A miniature robot arm for the desk with working axis rotations and maybe a tool swapping mechanism. Controllable via an application.
  • An automatic food dispenser for pets. It would track the amount of food a pet has thus far requested by approaching the machine and stop giving out Food at given amount limits per day
  • A three dimensional LED Matrix with which one could display 3D-graphs (althoug with a very low resolution)
  • A Word Clock with extended functionality like temperature and humidity

Miniature Desk Robot Arm

The idea I liked the most for now was the miniature desk robot. I already worked and controlled larger industrial robots and was always fascinated by their precise movements ad their speed. Since I for now have no idea as to how I would design such a machine, I simply sketched out my first rough idea on paper:

Rough Overview
Base and First Arm
Second Arm and Head

I am not the greatest at creating sketches but I think my idea comes across when looking at the Sketches. The robot arm would be able to turn 360 degrees on the base. The first arm then can move slightly less than 180 degrees. The second arm should also be restricted to round about 180 degrees, so that the robot can not touch itself and hence destroy itself. Regarding the head of the machine I am still usure what to do. For now it is just a round shape and its base at the second arm is able to rotate a full 360 degrees. To get my idea across a little better I also searched for a picture roughly depicting what I am envisioning:

Reference Image

Automatic Pet Food Dispenser and Tracker

My second favourite Idea was one of a food dispenser for pets. This machine would automatically sense a pet approaching the bowl. After sensing the pet and checking if the bowl is empty and a specific time frame has past since the lasst time the pet was fed, it would dispense a small amount of food into the bowl. In the backgroud the machinne would simultaiously check the amount of food the pet has thus far gotten and the amount of times and timeframes the pet has received food. This could be used by the owner of the pet to monitor its feeding and also limit how much the pet is fed per day by setting a maximum amount of food which can be dispensed. This device could also show the owner a trend of the pets' eating rythm and alarm the user if the pet is not eating enough. Maybe with even more data like weight measured by a scale infront of the bowls the device could create a health sheet for the pet with a multitude of possible data.

A rough sketch up of my idea

3D-LED Matrix

For this idea I envisioned a cubic array of LEDs which can be seperately driven to create 3-Dimensional images or even display 3-dimensional graphs. The LEDs would have to be mounted in a hanging fashion on something like a fishig line so that one could clearly see each LED. This fishing line or something else would than be attached at a top and a bottom base plate where oe could hide the electronics. I am however not quite shure how i would be able to attach all the LEDs to the controller while still maintaining the clean see through look I think of.


A word clock with enhanced features

A few years ago I first saw the concept of a word Clock. It displays time by Illuminating LEDs behind words which the spell out the time like: "It is half past Eleven". I always thought of this as a cool alternative to a standard clock. These devices are however not exactly cheap, especially not whe one has to consider that the device is only capable of telling the time. And even this is only true in 15-Minute intervalls for most of the clocks I had found back then. My idea would be to crteate such a Clock but enhance its features by adding humidity- and temperatur sensors.