Week 18: Invention, Intellectual Property and Income
Individual Assignment: 1) Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project, 2) Complete your final project, tracking your progress
We will dedicate sections on this page to the parts of the project that we will design and produce:
Candy dispenser and mechanism
Dispenser - 1st Prototype: first prototype can hold the just 2 chocolates for testing of the main idea. This model is spun by hand.
Dispenser - 2nd Prototype: second prototype can hold the 3 chocolates for testing. It has a motor attached, but some difficulty is there with the spinner being too weak and hitting the screw heads.
After reprinting the spinner, but thicker for strength, we tested as shown, and it works!
Version 2b of the chocolate dispenser has an additional tower with a capacity of 12 chocolates. The pegs on the left of the dispenser manifest an initial idea for attaching the dispenser to the sides of the head.
Dispenser - 3rd Prototype: third prototype integrates the hall effect sensor and to this end, has a magnet integrated into the blade pushing the chocolate. The idea is that the motor will be activated upon getting a positive signal from the controller, and will spin until the hall effect sensor gets the signal from the magnet on the blade.
Structural form of head
The initial concept is from the card-board test prototype from week 7, as we realized that the project does not need to have such size. However this prototype measure just 12.5 cm tall which is probably too small, because with this size we may only fit about 13-14 chocolates in the cannister.
Ideal height may be about 20 cm: if the dispenser mouth is 3 cm from the bottom, allowing 15 cm for the total height of the cannister of chocolates, that will allow capacity of 20 chocolates as each is 7.5 mm in height. Here are some calculations of the initial CNC design, the cardboard prototype, and possible dimensions for the final project, at 40% scale.
Initially this seems a good size, neither too small nor to big. The slightly larger size allows us to dispense more chocolates in between refillings, a width of 10 cm will also allow someone to somewhat easily put their hand inside for maintenance. At the same time it is still small enough so as to be portable. Of course a linear scaling of 40% only, actually implies a reduction of volume by 93% so it is quite portable.
Now a subsequent issue will involve having a smooth curve for the head, not completely blocky. As seen from this picture from CNC week, the idea was there already:
But how to create this curved feature? Well kerf-bending may help, in particular we may draw inspiration from a beautiful poop-basket for the Bambu Lab printers, developed by Recko.
Board with ESP32-C3 and other devices
Here is the initial schematic showing the board and devices:
Here is the initial PCB design:
Upon reflection and feedback from Saheen we will redesign, we'll redesign in a more efficient way and also use JST connectors, not only for the hall effect sensor, but for the motor, OLED, RC522 - in short, all our peripherals will be connected to the main board through JST connectors. This will allow flexibility in placing the board in the head, as the components can be adjusted and moved to the precise required locations instead of being forever statically fixed to the board.