bgrif001-blog

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PENGY IS COMPLETE AND IT READY FOR PLAY-TESTING 

I got a lot of people to come over and play test the device. I wanted to see what they thought. I also wanted to see if they had any feedback about what could be improved and is this device something you can see yourself using or will you buy a product like this for a loved one. 

I was really happy with all the feedback and they gave me a lot of good tips on how this can design and functionality can improve. 

All feedback can be found on my feedback video

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_J4OvJZhng&t=1s

I chose this video to show because people seemed to enjoy the game and we have fun doing it!

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BOARDS ARE SOLDERED AND READY FOR PLACEMENT 

The boards for the LED and LDR are soldered to an Adafruit strip board. As you can see I have designed holes in both sides of each shell, so that the wires can pass through and stay joined to the raspberry pi.

All that is left to do is stick the boards in the correct places and begin to do final preparations before full testing the device. You can also get a good look from this picture at all the servo is place at the top of the box that helps move the servo around. In the other shell is a Raspberry Pi, the microphone, speaker and button. 

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THE PILL TRAY DESIGN IS COMPLETE 

Sine my recent pill drop fail, I was able to redesign the pill tray. Now as you can see from the video the pill are placed on a 360 degree table that has eight compartments, seven of which are sealed using acyclic and plastic. The reason for the inside piece of acyclic is because the pill needed to be placed at the end of the component for the pill to fall down to the tray. The outter design was created using small shards of plastic which I was able to cut out pricelessly to match each compartment. This stops the pill from falling off the edge.

With this new design the user is able to now place 7 days worth of prescribed medication in different compartments and the pills wont fall off the sides. Also I have placed a small bit of foam at the bottom to make sure the pill falls exactly in the right place so that it covers the light sensor. 

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TIMMER FUNCTION INSTALLED!

Pengy now has a timer function installed that interacts with the python library datetime. This way I can now programme real times and dates in reaction to the users pill time schedule. 

As you can see from the video as soon the time become 1:05 the user was alerted by a voice animation and the servo moved and pushed a rectangle piece of acyclic around, allowing for a pill to be pushed down on to the tray ready for collection. 

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PILL DROP FAIL

As you can see I have placed each individual tablet in its own compartment, dependent on day. The servo then pushes the tablets around and drops a pill down on to a tray. 

After testing this machoism the biggest amount of feedback received was why do I only have four compartments and also finding that I need to design a way so that the pills don’t fall off from the side of my box. 

THE NEXT STEP:  Find a way of creating more compartments so that can user can use Pengy for more than 4 days. Also I need to creat a safe fluid motion so that the pills can travel around the circular tray without falling off the top. 

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THE PILL DISPENSER 

The tray have been stuck together with cement, acyclic glue and then stuck to the box. As you can see the hole at the bottom will be where the light sensor will lay. As you can see the pills are all nearly covering the hole which will send a LDR reading to the web browser. 

The top was made out of small circles I cut and stuck on top of each other to make a circle like tube shape, which I then stuck some acyclic to the side of. This machoism will be controlled by a servo in the box that will push the tablets down the slop of the tray to the LDR at the bottom. 

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THE SPINNING HAND

At this moment in time, I am testing for times and many hands I should put on the pill dispenser, So each time the hand spins it should push one department thats holding that days worth of pills. I am thinking of only adding 2 more hands making it have 3 different compartments and consist of 3 different days, 

This way it can keep you mentally simulated to remind  you to keep re-placing the pills on the tray every three days, I will need to code in to the text side a three day reminder to replace the tablets. 

Code for this can be found on my gitlab - https://gitlab.doc.gold.ac.uk/bgrif001/final-project-P/blob/master/The%20Py%20files%20/Servo.py

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HELLO THERE PENGY

A first look at Pengy in her case! I decided to go for a smile face instead of the circles as by female opinion it looked more approachable and fun that having circles like my last design. 

When asking for a males opinion, they didn’t seem to be bothered either way but down to a vote and popular opinion by others I decided to create a smile like face instead. 

Now time to make the pill dispenser that sicks on to the side and is fed wires through the side which will control the servo, LDR and LEDs. 

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ITS ALL COMING TOGETHER!

Glueing together the final part of my design, this is a video of me using cement to stick to pill tray together. After lots of different designs, I finally came up with the idea to create a pill dispenser next to the talking robot. 

I used cement acrylic glue to stick together the different parts of acrylic to create a slope, so once the pill is pushed from the top of the device it will fall down a slope and cover the light sensor at the bottom. This will then give a signal from the LDR to the web browser that a pill is still in the tray. Once the pill is taken from the tray the light sensor will then tell the browser that the pill has been taken, notifying their loved ones whether the pill has been taken or not.  

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NOT ENOUGH SPACE!!

After putting together the acyclic box that I printed out, I realised there is not enough space due to other wires, the box is measured to perfection in the sense of holes for the right places but I didn't count of the length of the sensor in the box, so when putting together the box I realised that the button wouldnt be able to fit underneath it, so I created another box just for the pill dispenser, please find the new designs in the gitlab - 

https://gitlab.doc.gold.ac.uk/bgrif001/final-project-P/blob/master/Box%20designs/NewDesigns.png

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CAPTURING LDR READINGS  

After my previous blog post about gathering the LDR values I realised the values were not accurate so I decided to re wire the LDR connecting the resistor to the negative part of the board and another wire from the negative side to the ground connecting the positive to the 3v3, if I connected it to the 5v it could potentially damage my raspberry Pi. 

The code can be found on my git lab: https://gitlab.doc.gold.ac.uk/bgrif001/final-project-P/blob/master/The%20Py%20files%20/LDR.py

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USING PULSE WIDTH MODULATION TO CONTROL THE SERVO

Instead of using the built in function inside the google api, I could of imported the class servo from the gpizero library and called it by servo1= max. The problem with this is it would only go around 180 degrees and stop, you would then need to run servo1 = min to bring the servo back to 0 degrees.

The problem is I want the servo to move around in a circle and stop at 5 degrees then go again. So i decided to buy a 360 servo and use the pulse width modulation to get it moving. I called the pin number and gave it a frequency for 50 and started it at 0, I messed around with a couple of examples and finally found that 7 gave the best results. The problem with using PWM doesn't give me accurate results so I thought to use hardware instead of software and install pigpio, as soon as I ran the code the speaker would make a noise and I realised that the google api couldn't handle being used with the gpio servo, please look at the blog - PROBLEM INSTALLING PIGPO to better a better idea of what I mean. 

LINK TO GIT REPO - https://gitlab.doc.gold.ac.uk/bgrif001/final-project-P/blob/master/The%20Py%20files%20/NewServoFile.py

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BROKEN PINS!

Unfortunately around 2 days ago i found that my servo and LEDs weren't working. When I looked towards the board I noticed that two of the pins have snapped off, I can only put this down to a poor soldering job mixed with moving the board around constantly from hatch lab to home. 

After taking the board back to university I was able to solder 7 more pins to the board to allow for error. If I decide the use a strip board that would be the only soldering I would need left to do.

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THE FINAL DESIGNS ARE CUT! 

As you can see from the pictures above, the top picture is the front of the box and the bottom picture is the back. 

I have also designed a tray which I’m about to glue together with cement. Once this is completed I can continue to work on some python code that needs to be looked at.

Now that I have finished most parts of the code and know that everything works I have soldered the correct pins to the raspberryPi board.

You can find designs of my box on my gitlab repository. 

Link: https://gitlab.doc.gold.ac.uk/bgrif001/final-project-P/tree/master/Box%20designs

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HOW I CONNECTED MY LIGHT SENSOR

These pictures were taken from https://projects.raspberrypi.org

When connecting previous servos and LEDs to my voice hat I used the servo side of the board which has 3 pins. (PIN 5V GROUND) but when connecting my LightSensor to the servos it wouldn't work because to use a light sensor with a capacitor I needed to use the 3v3 port not the 5V port. 

So I looked on the voice hat where the 3v3 pin was and connected the other two wires to the servo pins but I then realised they couldn't find each other because 3v3 could understand the servo pins. I then went to look up what where the numbers of the ground pins on the board and I noticed at the top row of the voice hat they had a hole called SPI_CEO otherwise known as GPIO 7 which was great news! So i then connect it the wires to 3v3 GND on the upper row and now the pin to GPIO 7 and it worked! You can find the video of me receiving the reading from my light sensor in my previous video. 

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LIGHT SENSOR READINGS

I connected a light sensor to my raspberryPi voice hat. At first this was very confusing as on which I will explain in pictures on my following blog posts. 

I just wanted to say that this post is showing you readings taken from my raspberry pi and printing out different values of of whether is light is touching the sensor or not.

In my script im running the line: ldr = LightSensor then I print out the ldr.value. 

LightSensor is an inbuilt function taken from the gpizero library. 

You can find the code for this in my git repository: 

https://gitlab.doc.gold.ac.uk/bgrif001/final-project-P/blob/master/The%20Py%20files%20/LDR_readings.py

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FINAL DESIGNS BEFORE THE FINAL ACRYLIC CUT

I actually did manage to cut the design in acrylic but unfortunately I cut my hand and wont be able to finish the cut until after the weekend. 

I have created a tray for the tablet. At the bottom of the tray will be a hole cut out for the light sensor. Once the pill falls down it covers the light sensor then once the pill is taken that will send a trigger to the web browser that will say whether a pill has been taken from the tray or not. 

I have a problem designing the rotation of the actual pills dispenser because as you can see from picture 2 the dot in the middle is where my servo will be, but its not actually in the middle of the circle which means that the pieces that move around the dispenser will not be even. I may have to make an executive design to put the compartments from 7 pill trays to 3. This decision will have to be made in the next coming days.

Next step - Get a light sensor working on my voice hat