First of all i would like to thank all of the people who commented on my first blog, I got a lot of great feedback which i will for sure be using in my project! I had the last finals, and now I'm completely free to dig into the project. By reading the comments i saw a lot of concern on how I'll be able to determine the mass of the ingredients themselves in the containers, and also the accuracy of the sensors themselves. So in the end I've decided to do the combination of all, which I think will be the easiest to actually make and use, without expensive high accuracy high load sensors.
1. The shelf itself will be divided into at least two sections By this I mean there will be a heavier and a lighter load part on the shelf, the idea behind this is to have useful results without expensive sensors (for example an error of 30g of flour doesn't make a big difference while that kind of error would be the difference of a full and empty package for some spices). This obviously means that different types on sensors will be needed for the project, these are the ones i managed to get my hands on for now (I should just point out I live in a place where I don't have many choices when it comes to sensors and when ordering stuff from outside the country usually takes a while).
(There are more types available for the first one when it comes to max load, these are the ones I have for now)
This is a small setup i prepared for playing around and testing the load cell, just waiting for the amp now
2. I will be combining the stickers with special containers.
Some of the stuff is usually kept in its own container always like sugar, coffee, flour,... ,while we sometimes buy things which we usually just keep in the bag it came in until we use it all, a case like that be for example pasta or cereal, and sometimes the thing itself comes in its own jar or special container. My idea is to continue to try out with the labels where now I would like to integrate my first plan with the labels, and that would be their color/shape for example. Few kinds of special containers each represented by a specific color/shape, each with known mass in the beginning so it takes part of the hassle out of the users experience, and for things that come in heavier containers when we buy them, the idea is to be able to enter the ingredient weight itself as stated on the package so that the Raspberry can calculate the container and remember the container mass. These are some of the containers i am thinking of using, (though there will probably be changes to the larger glass jars due to their sheer weight and possibility of breaking) I tried covering most of the areas from spices to containers for flour, rice,...
I've played a bit with Raspberry and Arduino, connecting them together and just testing out some stuff, I would like to hear if someone had any experience and tips with writing Arduino sensor data to a file on to the Raspberry or something similar, I've done some of it a while back on windows using processing. Ill try to have a complete 3D model for the next blog and also to manage to upload some sensor data online. Thank you for reading the whole blog!!!
Milos
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