Applications and Implications · Project Development

Planning ORDER, my restaurant table ordering device

This is the planning week for my final project, ORDER. Instead of building, I sit down and answer the big questions so the rest of the project has a clear path. ORDER is a small ESP32 touchscreen device that sits on a restaurant table. A guest browses the menu on the screen, picks dishes, and sends the order over WiFi straight to the kitchen, all from inside a 3D printed enclosure I make in the lab. Below I work through every question the assignment asks, each as its own part.

1. What will it do?

ORDER lets a guest at a restaurant table place an order without waiting for a waiter to come over. The device shows the menu on a colour touchscreen. The guest taps the dishes they want, sees a running total, and presses send. The order travels over WiFi to a small kitchen screen or to a web page the staff watch. A waiter still brings the food and clears the table, but the slow part, getting the order taken, happens in seconds.

Day to day it does four things. It displays a menu I can edit. It reads taps on the screen so the guest can choose and change items. It keeps a basket with quantities and a price total. And it sends that basket over WiFi when the guest is ready. The device runs on an ESP32, which gives me both the processing for the touchscreen and the WiFi radio in one module.

2. Who has done what beforehand?

Table ordering is not a new idea, so I studied what already exists before deciding what mine should be. Commercial table tablets like those from Presto and the menu tablets used in some chain restaurants do roughly this job, but they are full Android tablets locked to one vendor and they cost far more than a small lab can justify. QR code menus, which became common after 2020, solve part of the problem but push the work onto the guest's own phone and need every guest to have data and a working camera.

In the maker world there are many ESP32 touchscreen projects on the ESP32 forums, on Hackaday, and in the LVGL and Arduino communities. People have built smart home panels, weather displays and small point of sale demos. A few past Fab Academy students have built menu or kiosk style devices. I am borrowing the proven ideas from all of these, an ESP32 driving a touchscreen with a graphics library and talking over WiFi, and aiming them at one focused job. What is different about ORDER is that the board, the enclosure and the firmware are all made by me in the lab, it is built to be low cost so a small restaurant could afford several units, and it does one thing well instead of being a general tablet.

3. What sources will you use?

I lean on a mix of documentation, community work and people. For the chip I use the Espressif ESP32 datasheet and the Arduino core for ESP32. For the screen I use the manufacturer datasheet plus the TFT_eSPI and LVGL libraries and their examples and forums. For the look of the interface I use LVGL widget documentation. For the board I use the KiCad documentation and the Fab Academy reference designs from earlier electronics weeks. For the enclosure I use the SolidWorks help and the slicer documentation for my 3D printer. On top of the written sources I have the Fab Academy archive of past student final projects, the global and regional review sessions, and the local instructors at Fab Lab Rwanda who I can ask directly.

4. What will you design, and what will you buy?

I design the parts that make ORDER mine and buy the standard parts there is no reason to make from scratch.

What I will design and make

• The custom carrier board that holds the ESP32 module, the screen connector, power regulation and the touch lines. Drawn in KiCad.
• The full enclosure: a 3D printed body, a machined or laser cut base plate, the screen bezel and the snap or screw fittings. Modelled in SolidWorks.
• All the firmware: the menu data, the touchscreen interface, the basket logic and the WiFi sending. Written in the Arduino environment.
• The simple kitchen side web page or screen that receives and lists incoming orders.

What I will buy or take from inventory

• The ESP32 module itself.
• The colour touchscreen display.
• Passive components, connectors, a voltage regulator and headers.
• Copper clad board blank, 3D printing filament, sheet stock for the base, screws and standoffs.

5. What materials and components will be used?

The electronics centre on an ESP32 WROOM module and a capacitive or resistive colour TFT touchscreen, around 2.8 to 3.5 inches, with an SPI or parallel interface. Around them sit a 3.3 volt regulator, a USB connector for power and flashing, decoupling capacitors, resistors, a few headers and a connector for the display ribbon. The board itself is single sided FR1 or FR4 copper clad blank that I mill in the lab. The enclosure is PLA or PETG filament for the printed body, a sheet of acrylic or plywood for the machined or laser cut base, and M3 screws and standoffs to hold the layers and the screen together.

6. Where will they come from?

Most of the small parts come straight from the Fab Lab Rwanda inventory, which already stocks the ESP32 modules, passives, connectors, copper clad blanks and filament from earlier weeks. The touchscreen I buy from a local Kigali electronics supplier or order online if I need a specific size. Screws, standoffs and sheet stock come from lab stock. Buying locally where I can keeps the lead time short, and falling back to an online order only for the display means the rest of the project never waits on shipping.

7. How much will they cost?

This is my first bill of materials for ORDER. Prices are in Rwandan francs as estimates and I will update them as I actually buy and mill parts.

8. What parts and systems will be made?

ORDER has to integrate every fabrication area the assignment cares about. I planned it so that no area is left out. The table below maps each part of the device to the process that makes it, and you can see that 2D design, 3D design, additive fabrication, subtractive fabrication, electronics design and production, embedded programming and final integration are all present.

9. What processes will be used?

Reading down the list, the processes are: 2D vector design for the bezel and base and for the milling outlines; 3D modelling for the enclosure; additive fabrication by 3D printing the body; subtractive fabrication by milling the board and laser cutting the base; electronics design in KiCad and electronics production by milling and soldering; embedded programming in the Arduino environment; networking over WiFi; and finally system integration where I fit the electronics into the enclosure, flash the firmware and test the whole device as one product. Earlier assignment weeks each contributed a piece, and this final project is where they all come together.

10. What questions need to be answered?

• Can the ESP32 drive a screen this size smoothly while keeping WiFi connected, or do I need to manage the timing carefully?
• Which touchscreen interface, SPI or parallel, gives a fast enough response for tapping menu items without feeling slow?
• How do I store and edit the menu so a restaurant could change prices without reflashing the device?
• What is the most reliable and simple way to send an order over WiFi to the kitchen, a direct request to a small server or a message to a web page?
• Will the board, the screen and the wiring all fit inside the enclosure I designed, with room for the connectors?
• Should the device run on a wall adapter, since it sits on a table, or do I need any battery backup?

11. How will it be evaluated?

I will judge ORDER against clear tests rather than a feeling. The main job is the bar: a guest can open the menu, choose several items, change a quantity, see a correct total, and the order arrives complete and readable on the kitchen side over WiFi. I will measure how fast the screen responds to a tap and whether the WiFi send works repeatedly without dropping. I will check that it looks and feels like a finished product, with the screen sitting flush in the bezel and no loose wires. Last, I will check that someone else could rebuild it from my documentation, my board files, my SolidWorks files and my firmware. A simple test plan is to leave it running for a full day taking mock orders and confirm the readings, the totals and the kitchen messages all stay correct.

12. Project plan and schedule

This is my plan for the weeks left until the final presentation, with a progress column I keep up to date.

13. Presentation drafts

I prepared a draft summary slide and a draft video clip for ORDER and put them in the root of my repository as presentation.png and presentation.mp4. The slide is 1920 by 1080. The video is 1080p, under one minute and under 25 MB. Both are linked from the final presentation schedule so they are ready to drop into the final presentation page.

What I learned

Writing the plan down made ORDER feel real and a lot less scary. Once I listed the parts, the costs and the steps, I could see what I already had from earlier weeks and what was still missing. Mapping each part of the device to a fabrication process showed me that the project really does pull together everything I learned, from the milled board to the printed enclosure to the WiFi firmware. The bill of materials and the schedule are the two things I will keep updating as I build.

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