Introduction

This week I continued to work on my final project. On this page will further describe the circumstances of my project, and answer some specific questions.

Some questions are answered in the Final project documentations, which can be found here.

What will my project do?

My final project - an Oracle - will be making a positive random prophecy for you, so you can find an encouragement and motivation in hard times.

What has been done beforehand?

There are the traditional Chinese fortune cookies.

Then there is the Magic 8 Ball.

But none of them are truly personalized, so that could be the novelty in this case.

Materials and components will

Bellow is the list of all materials I used for the project. I always used the unit price simulating how much would it cost if I purchased the component alone (not in bulk). However, there were some components that you have buy as a whole even if you use only a fraction for this project - solder and rivets. What I did was I checked how much these components cost, and them I only added a part of this cost to my Bill of material (the thinking behind it is that even if I buy it for this project, I can use the rest of it for some future project).

If I were to reproduce this project, e.g. build another robot, I would either buy the parts from the local FabLab, or purchase them of various websites. Here are some of my favorite ones:

• For the bulk shopping I believe the DigiKey is the best and also has the largest selection. It is also quite internationl, meaning if someone abroad wants to reproduce your project, they can probably find DigiKey in they country, or the DigiKey has a shipping to their country
• For some specific microcontrollers I like to use Aliexpress. It usually takes a long time till the components arrive, but it is very cheap and in my experience the components were a good quality
• The is also a Slovak hardware store that I particularly like, GM Electronics, mostly because I find it a bit cheaper than DigiKey, and you can pick up the components the next day (which is superfast, and also you don’t have to pay for shipping). Slovakia only though!
• Some other honorable mentions are Amazon, Verkkokauppa, K Rauta for some things, and Alza

Questions to answer

• Will it work?
• How can I keep the “prophecies” relevant, but truly random?
• Can I use a different medium than text (for example a picture) without making an ML model or paying for API?