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Inspiration

H1 Living at University while Taking Care of A Pet

While attending cadathon is a very exciting experience, one of our team members, was worried. Upon further investigation, this teammate was stressed because they had left their dog at home, and wouldn't be seeing them for 23 hours! To help alleviate their stress, we decided to create a device to help them, the roombot dog feeder!

What it does

The roombot dog feeder is a roomba attachment, designed to deliver food to dog bowls in a consistent and portioned manner. It also features a speaker that you can use to interact with your dog when away from home. This speaker also lets the dog know when it's food time!

How we built it

The food delivery system is a compact adaptation of a traditional food dispenser, utilizing a worm gear mechanism. It features six evenly spaced threads, enabling users to precisely control portion sizes for their pets. This mechanism is powered by a stepper motor, providing exceptional accuracy and reliability. Food is stored above the auger system, where gravity assists in guiding it into the spout. The tight tolerances between the auger and spout enhance the system's reliability, ensuring a low failure rate.

Challenges we ran into

During our brainstorming session, it became clear that simplicity and reliability were key priorities for the system. We encountered challenges in determining precise tolerances, accounting for material expansion during 3D printing, the inherent tolerances of the 3D printer, and ensuring all components fit seamlessly. Additionally, we faced difficulties in designing the system to be easy to clean. This required creating a user-friendly mechanism that could be effortlessly disassembled and reassembled for maintenance

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are porud of creating a system that has a low failture rate, easy to understand by the enduser, and has a asthetically pleasing design allowing it to blend into any home. We are also very that we were able to produce a physical demonstration within the alloted time frame.

What we learned

We learned how to render images, and work modularly in parallel to finish our design within 23 hours. We also learned how to CAD worm gears, research best product design practies for a good enduser soloutions, and how to design with constraints.

What's next for RoomBot Dog Feeder

We would like to iterate over our design to fix some physical flaws that we observed when printing our prototype. We awould also like to go futher by incorporating more electronic and software based components to make this a real product.