Final Project-Week 3

Week 3

There are four main objectives to tackle this week

1. Get the button to work
2. Lengthen the flashing time of LED
3. Make 3D printed spool
4. Fit everything in the box

1)2)

First, the button. As the first button was being hooked up, there was only success on either only the LED or the button, which should not be the case because even though they are now built as one they operate separately.  The alligator clips only made things more confusing before the button was short-circuited due to exposed alligator clips. Smoky… Soldering the prongs to wires and heat shrinking the tubes will prevent what had just happened, good thing we have another button. But after messing around with that one, I may or may not have short-circuited it again. Hanna in the meantime worked on the spool on Solidworks. I edited the program to lengthen the flashing. After struggling with the button, I turned to Amy for help. We decided that the second button is indeed broken. So we moved to the third. This time correctly color coded according to the convention and the rest of my circuit. The button finally responded but a pull-down resistor needed to be added to the button, so Amy showed us a code that incorporates the pull-down resistor into the code.

After experimenting for a while, the button finally worked. 

3) The 3D printed spool that Hanna made did not turn out well, but what we learned is that the original design was too big. And even though 3D printed parts are brittle you can indeed drill holes in them. So after coming up with the new dimension, Hanna went to remake the part on Solidworks. The part finished printing on Saturday, and it turned out well.

4) Even though objective four sounds like it should be the end, it actually happened before the spool was done. We realized during the week that the Arduino UNO, Breadboard, and battery were just a little big too big to fit comfortably inside the box. In the meantime, I became obsessed with the idea of shrinking the entire apparatus, but Hanna felt like it was unnecessary and wanted to shrink the spool and the battery pack. I felt like the idea of shrinking the apparatus was a great challenge and also satisfies my urge to keep everything simple, I decided to do it regardless. I looked up many sources on the internet and failed to program the Arduino pro mini until I found a way to program the mini with an UNO. It took a long time but I was happy when it finally said done uploading on the bottom of my Arduino programmer. Then I wanted to shrink the breadboard into a soldered protoboard. It is compact, wires can’t be disconnected and I can incorporate the Arduino pro mini into the board. This is as simple and compact as my knowledge allows me to make this project. After few hours of careful planning, soldering and color coding, the compact apparatus worked on the first try!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Since nothing worked on the first try on the project and I understand how careless of a human being I am, this is truly a miracle. Hanna drilled the holes on the box for the string and button to go through and I hot glued the parts to loosely hold it in place. YAY….

Video

VIDEO OF REAL TOILET FLUSHING

How it could be improved:

1. The servo mount, currently the servo is hot glued on a PVC pipe that I cut to be a good height for the spool to not hit the bottom or the top of the box.
2. The position of the battery pack is hard to reach when the batteries need to be switched out.
3. The battery pack could be replaced with one single 9V battery, which could be placed in a more accessible spot and be more compact, but one concern is that 1.5V batteries are more accessible in daily life in general.
4. the placement of the hole for the string to go through the bottom is slightly off, which causes the string to rub on the edge of the hole. This could be prevented by drilling the hole that is on the tangent line of the spool that perpendicularly intersects the bottom of the box.
5. Even though the Arduino Mini pro consumes way lower energy than the Arduino UNO, there seems to be a way to cut down the power consumption my even more. http://www.home-automation-community.com/arduino-low-power-how-to-run-atmega328p-for-a-year-on-coin-cell-battery/

Sources that I used throughout the process: (I have consulted a lot more sources but these were the ones that were actually helpful)

Button: https://www.arduino.cc/en/tutorial/button

Input Pullup: Amy! and https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/InputPullupSerial

Servo: https://www.arduino.cc/en/reference/servo

Calculating torque required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_metre

Parts: https://www.adafruit.com/

Arduino Pro Mini: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/ArduinoProMini

http://www.instructables.com/id/Program-Arduino-Pro-Mini-Using-Arduino-Uno/  (MOST HELPFUL )