Smart Drinks - Team 7

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  Our Mechanism

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  Water Pump

Inspiration

Do you ever get annoyed when you're at a water fountain and the water doesn't fill up your water bottle completely, or it over fills the bottle? We share the same anger as you and we decided to come up with a solution since drinking liquids is a part of our everyday lives. Another practical application would be for restaurants where the portion sizes or drinks can be better regulated. With Smart Drinks, people can now get their drinks in their own containers, of any shape and size, filled up to 90% of its capacity.

What it does

We use an ultrasonic sensor at the top of the dispenser to measure the initial depth of the container. Another ultrasonic sensor hooked up to a pulley system finds the position of the rim of the container. We use the the rpm of the pulleys to find this distance. The water pump we built from scratch then starts pumping the liquid. The ultrasonic sensor which found the initial depth now measures the instantaneous change in depth of the liquid with respect to the position of the rim. When the water fills 80% of the container which is sensed by the ultrasonic sensor, the pump stops pumping the liquid.

How we built it

We used Arduino Uno boards, DC motors, 3D Printing, Circuitry, Soldering, Solidworks, Power + Hand Tools, ultrasonic and IR sensors.

Challenges we ran into

A few challenges that we ran into was troubleshooting the motors, we needed 2 motors for the pull system but for some reason it did not work. There were also no belts for our system so we needed to improvise with medical tubing. When assembling the machine, we realized that the motors were not strong enough to drive the pulley system.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to come up with a cool idea, and a cool conceptual way to execute it.

What we learned

We were able to learn a lot about arduinos and how to sync boards together.

What's next for Smart Drinks

Ideally we would love for this to be implemented on a larger scale with more water dispensers to make them all "Smart" dispensers.