Two members of our group, Zann and Yu Yun, went down to the Making and Tinkering Lab to procure materials for testing at home. While we were at the Making and Tinkering Lab, we engaged in discussions with Tony and realised that our initial plan of recreating the whole mixer was unfeasible due to two reasons. Firstly, the motor must be very powerful to mix the ingredients, and operating high power motors are extremely dangerous. Our proposed component, an L298N motor driver, would also not be able to output a high enough current for a power motor. The suggestion given to us was to buy a commercial mixer, then modify it. We were hesitant to fiddle with the electronics in the commercial mixer as we were afraid that we would accidentally render the mixer unusable, hence we opted to design an additional contraption that can push buttons on behalf of the user. The second reason is that if we bought a commercial mixer, the mixer may operate too loudly for voice recognition to be picked up, if our microphone is placed next to the mixer. The suggestion was to either use the microphone of our phone and link it to the mixer through Bluetooth, or use a narrowed filter at different frequencies and differential equations that part with training data, which requires Artificial Intelligence.
After much discussion within our group, we decided to change our project to one that requires more hands-on work, and we decided on a contraption which is able to both sort, and then dispense coins. In the market, there are multiple kinds of coin sorters and coin dispensers, but not a contraption that does both. We thought of combining these two purposes into one simple machine, through the use of 3D printing and a simple vibration motor.