Initial Phase

This was the very first draft we had – admittedly an insane and overly ambitious project for 2 people HAHA. The idea was to mimic the “motion” of the plate in a normal hawker stall as well as the positions of the various ingredients. The ingredients would be dispensed on a moving strainer on the right while would be cooked, while the sauces would be dispensed onto a plate moving along a conveyor belt. The plate would then gather at a central position where the ingredients would be off loaded onto the plate.

 

These two pictures above was the second draft – a robotic arm meant to perform a fixed set of movements to fixed positions which would cook the noodles and dump it out on a plate, and a sauce dispensing station meant to push a certain amount of sauces onto the plate. Less movement, but still rather difficult to implement as there was no real way to completely balance the torques on the vertical arm (which would lead to difficulty turning the whole arm as the vertical arm goes slightly out of alignment with its joint at the bottom), as well as the machining of the whole arm (due to the need for rotation of the strainer along the axis which laid directly along a moving arm)

This was a third draft with a “no-motion” concept. This removed the need for the robotic arm, by placing all the ingredients in a central point, which would then be cooked there and served there. In here there are two moving arms controlled by stepper motors, but in the next iteration of this we reduce this to one, and we’re currently considering the idea of building one with no motor (so the motion is human controlled – although since it’s extremely easy, it brings no greater trouble to the user)

 

This is our current idea. Sauce containers have been reduced from 4 to 2 – split into water-based sauces and oil-based sauces. The sauces are then pre-mixed and placed in these containers. When the plate with ingredients is placed on the platform, force sensitive resistors (under the aluminium profile currently) sense this change in force applied to them, which is picked up by the microcontroller. This then triggers the arm (pvc pipe containing the tubings and lid) to come down onto the plate. Hot water is then pumped into the plate to cook the ingredients, then the hot water is sucked out and replaced by cold water. After the cold water is sucked out, the sauces are pumped into the plate, and it is ready to mix and serve.

 

Some planned improvements to the above are adding a vibrating platform for the plate to be placed on so as to loosen the noodles as its cooked (this should – theoretically – be done intermittently while it’s cooking, which will change the cooking time and needs to be experimented on), as well as possibly not even having a motor to move the arm down (so instead, the user will move them arm down manually and there will be a time delay for this to happen)

Prototype

 So after a few attempts at trying to figure out the dimensions and mechanics for the previous idea (and failing), we stumbled upon an unassembled Ender 3, which we realised we could then repurpose to use as the mechanism for the cooking of noodles

This is a super rough mockup through Fusion360, but basically we will sandwich the noodle cooking platform between two hot water dispensers, where the second one will dispense back into the first one so the water is recycled.

The lid to cook the noodles in the bowl will be lowered by the 3D printer, and all the tubes will be ran through it

Final Product

Final Product images/videos with descriptions.