Motivations
Hello! The main motivation is enable people to cook pasta in semi-automated ways. This will help people with disabilities to enjoy cooking. If this project is successful, this can serve as a monitoring system for their families and health care people.
Manual cooking is hard for people with disabilities. For example, there are multiple steps to cook pasta. It will involve cutting vegetables, boiling water (need to wait), stirring pasta periodically, check pasta once a while till they get ready, and cook toppings.
Figure 1: Project Concept
Proof of Concept Prototypes
For this project, I will focus on a few features which are realistic with existing off-the-shelf sensors. My hope is this will help people with disabilities and elderly and busy people as well.
Figure 2 lists customers and a few sensors around Arduino Nano 33 IOT.
Figure 2: Proof of Concept (PoC) Prototype Idea
Here are what this PoC prototype system could do.
1. Cooking System
1.1 Non-contact water sensor when they pour water into a pot
1.2 Water Temperature Sensor to display current temperature
1.3 Timer - stopwatch starts after water reaches a boiling temperature
1.4 Automated Stirrer by servo motors
2. Alert Systems while cooking
2.1 Light for deaf people
2.2 Vibration for deaf and blind people
2.3 Buzzer for blind people
3. Alter their families and health care people when emergency happens
3.1 If any abnormal things happen, the Arduino Nano 33 IOT system will send notifications to their families and health care workers.
Project Schedule
This project deadline is May 27. I have planned 6 phases in this project as you can see in Table 1. The project includes Arduino coding, PCB and Mechanical design. Of course, system integration and testing will happen after software and hardware are ready.
The tests include cooking pasta
Table 1: Project Schedule
Starting the project ...
To start this new project, it is important to set up software environment and repository. The Arduino Nano 33 IOT has not arrived yet, so I just started setting up the Arduino software environment and git repository!
1. Arduino Setup
So far, I have installed
1. Arduino SAMD Boards for Nano 33 on Board Manager as shown in Figure 3.
2. Wifinina on Library Manager
Figure 3: Arduino Nano 33 IOT.
Now, I'll need to wait for Arduino Nano 33 IOT to arrive!
2. Github Repository
Here is my git repository for this project.
GitHub - kurama007/design_for_a_cause_2021: Element14 Design for A Cause 2021 Contest
Thank you for reading this blog post! Please feel free to make any comments and give suggestions for improvements