To tackle the issue of ensuring that the pumps stop dispensing liquid based on their weights, we decided to set a meeting outside of the Making-and-Tinkering Lab for the first time. We gathered at Jayna’s house (our group leader!), ready to face our computer screens and churn out a code that would achieve our goal by the end of the day.
For the first half of the day, we made little progress, with none of our codes even remotely making the pumps dispense the liquids based on the weight measured by the load cell. However, as the day was ending and we were about to wrap up, we managed to write a program code that controlled the pump to stop dispensing liquid once the target weight was reached. While the code only worked for one pump at a time, it was significant progress and made our goal seem more achievable compared to in the morning.
We then managed to refine the code such that the pump would only start dispensing liquid when a specific button is pressed and would stop dispensing liquid once the target weight on the load cell is reached. Now that we had done so with a physical button, we tried to replicate it using the IoT cloud instead. It took a few days and a lot of trial and error with the code, but eventually we were able to control the liquid dispensing from the pump using a combination of the IoT cloud and the load cell.
Aside from coding for our project, we also had another huge concern. This involved the creamer that we planned to use in our milk tea machine. Since creamers are a dairy product, this makes it extremely susceptible to being spoiled when left at room temperature. Thus, we were on the hunt to find a suitable creamer for our machines. While powder creamers generally do not spoil even at room temperature, there was no stirring mechanism in our machine to stir the powdered creamer into the drink.
We toyed with the idea of mixing in the powdered creamer without stirring it into the milk tea but we realised that since the creamer did not dissolve in that situation, it will not be feasible to use powdered creamer. Instead, we found a liquid creamer by CoffeeMate, which, once opened, could last for about a month at room temperature before spoiling. This was certainly something that was in our interests, so we set out to find out more about the creamer and how useful it would be to our project.
(Credits: Amazon)
While doing so, we were faced with another challenge: finding a machine to dispense boba pearls for our milk tea machine.