User:RaRickert/ENES-100:/Pet Food Controller

Week 1 Narrative
This week I was assigned a project: Project Pet Feeder. With the project came group members. Carlos Velasquez Zubia, Heidi Schultz, Michael A. Tomaselli, and myself. Our goal was to design a pet feeder that had specific requirements/things to account for. We had to be conscious of pet allergies (to plastic, stainless-steel, and food), work off rf-id tags, be able to handle multiple pets, and to be able to keep pets from pigging out on another's food portion. The idea is to make a system that is easy for pet owners to use without having to stay "on top" of their pets all the time. After hours of discussion we came up with a design. There were three main parts of the original design. Container: this would house all the components of the pet food controller, ideally see-thru and spacious enough for a pet to reside in while eating. Hopper: This part would be what actually dispensed the food in allotted increments of a pre-determined volume. This would also be the part where reading the rf-id tag is critical. (ex. Cat A has a specific type of food that Cat B is allergic to. So when Cat A shows up, the rf-id tag gets read and the appropriate food shows up for it.) Bowl-rotator: Due to certain pet allergies we came up with a Bowl-rotator. Basically this would contain four different bowls held together and turnable by a motor at the center. This way if a pet walks up their rf-id tag gets read, the bowl rotator rotates to its pre-designated bowl and the hopper dispenses whatever food was allotted for said pet. We split the group into 2 teams. Team one was Carlos Velasquez Zubia and Michael A. Tomaselli. They would take over the Food Hopper/dispenser. Team 2 consisted of Heidi Schultz, and myself. We were put in charge of the bowl rotator.

Week 2 Narrative
So moving forward, I focused my efforts on the motor of the bowl rotator. I reasoned that once I figured out the motor, the arms would be an easy next step. The first thing I found was a Servo. Specifically, I found a Servo 360 rotation mod Parallax. I think the arms can be adjusted to use a lip/tip system to connect the bowls. Thankfully, before I got too far into this idea, Professor Dolge showed me the an actual servo and pointed out that a servo of this size wouldn't have the torque or ability to manipulate the weight of 4 bowls And the contents of each. We were then pointed in the direction of a DC motor with speed controlled by PWM, or pulse-width modulation. Figured out the way to control something on the arduino with pulse-width modulation, when my girlfriend (Heather Goddard) suggested a garage door system. So I started looking into that. Realized that there were fewer points of failure compared to the bowl rotator, also we wouldn't care too much about weight if the bowl was on the bottom of the container. Ideally we would separate each bowl with walls to either side of it. Either a servo or a dc motor could be used to rotate the door. Heidi and I came up with a gear system that could work for this. She would calculate the teeth size required and I would figure out the motor aspect.

Week 3 Narrative
Moving forward, I now had a goal: find out which motor would be ideal for our project. I watch a few youtube videos for a quick summary of the two motors in question. Jaidyn Edwards "Arduino Tutorial #4" and [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsrAP8EgcbQ/? Avco Training's "DC Servo Principles"] I found that if I wanted to work with a DC motor, I'd need a H-bridge Shield for the Arduino. [insert pic of H-bridge Shield here] Decided that DC motor were out, because it would be simpler to have a motor that didn't require as much hardware. I put DC motors to the side as I checked out Servos. I learned that there are two basic ways to control a servo using an arduino. Either "Knob" or "Sweep". Variations are there, but these are the two basic sketches for using a servo via an arduino. I looked into knob first. This version had me get a potentiometer

I read Tolson Winters "How To Connect Servo To Arduino & Control With Potentiometer Knob [Arduino Tutorial"] and saw that my sketch and connectors looked right for the most part. Learned that one is supposed to turn the "knob" on the potentiometer and the servo spun like it was supposed to. As neat a concept as it is; this isn't applicable to my overall design.

As a side project I started making a 3D model of my idea in SketchUp. [find a way to put a sketchup file on here] Initially, I wanted to accurately illustrate my idea to my group so they would have a better understanding of what I was talking about.