Day 14: Measuring milk powder precisely
Hacking the parent duty of making a bottle one day at a time.
It is now day 13 of my challenge. And we are starting to get into the code side of things. Most of the printing is done now, it’s time to make the components move and get to making the bottle.
Requirement 1:
The user should have a way to enter a specific amount of scoops/grams of powder. The bottle maker should be able to measure the powder precisely and dispense it into a container.
Ideation:
Borrowing from systems used in poultry farms and to move grains in silos. I chose to design and make use of an Auger. A stepper motor to turn the auger and an Arduino platform to control the stepper motor. The idea is to assign a specific number of turns to an amount in grams of powder. Since the baby bottler allows for the user to enter a specific amount of scoops they require, we will need a way to precisely program our system to allow for this.
When an auger twists it pushes with it the powder. The first implementation I’m working on will assume a specific number of revolutions can push a precise amount of powder. This is the simplest possible design for now. On day 4/5 I printed the first version of the draft designs. I picked up a couple of issues that could be changed but more on those later.
Draft Solution:
Working on the device’s firmware, I will be using an ESP8266ex microcontroller since I have a couple laying around. A stepper motor driver and a NEMA17 motor from an old project.
Process:
The following are my high-level steps to achieving this.
Measure the amount of powder per revolution.
Assign the amount as a multiple of the configurable value in the settings.
Allow for user interaction using an LCD menu.
Show progress and the measurements on-screen.
First published on Substack.