machine design

designing and making a machine

This week is a little different from the others in that we're working as a section to create one bigger project, namely a machine of sorts.

I'll be using my site to document my contributions as part of the Stirring subteam, but the overall EECS group documentation can be found below:

EECS Machine Week: Barduino

Our group project is the Barduino, or an automated bartender. The idea is that we can preload drink orders and the machine will create the drink(s) of our choosing. Emma and Alexandru and I met initially to brainstorm ideas for the stirring mechanism: we had to make sure that the drinks were properly mixed and stirred before serving, and we had to make sure that this would be a food safe process (which, honestly, the EDS has so much lead and random things lying around so... but I digress).

Emma pitched the idea of using stir bars for the stirring mechanism, since she uses them in her research within the Brain & Cognitive Sciences Department. After getting initial parts from Anthony and EDS (motors, breadboard, microcontroller), the stirring team met in Emma's lab at BCS to pick up stir bars and to figure out the different components that we would need:

Our first brainstorming session

We decided to attach magnets to a motor for touchless drink stirring: the motor would rotate the magnets, which would push and pull the magnetic stir bars. Because this had to be food safe, we came up with the idea of using floss to lower and raise the stir bar into the drink (essentially a spooling system using floss, which would go over the cup and be mounted on top of the Barduino machine). At this point, we didn't have a concrete idea of what the Barduino would actually look like so we couldn't design the mount, but we were able to confirm that the magnetic stirring mechanism actually worked quite well when we tested it with a cup of water:

After we designed the general stirring mechanism,nwe created motor and magnet mounts using CAD and 3d printed them (shoutout to Alexandru for this step). CAD models below

Printed out models:

Emma and I designed the schematic for the actual motor spinning:

The stirring motor mounted on the actual Barduino machine. We actually had a lot of issues with the floss twisting too aggressively and too quickly; even with the motor speed significantly lowered, this proved to be a problem.

Meeting as a whole group and putting all of the various parts together. In hindsight, it probably wasn't a good idea to have all of the electronics right under the cups and the (dripping) liquids - this is something that we decided we would address as we continue to work on the Barduino after this week.

4:30 PM... or 4:30 AM?