Oct 4-Kitchen Object

Introduction:
This weeks project was to work on a kitchen object. We were supposed to observe and think about how people function everyday while cooking and come up with a device that would make their lives easier. After thinking about what would be handy to have around the kitchen when I'm cooking, my partner and I decided to make a some sort of vocal thermometer. I noticed that I would put a pot of water on to boil and leave the room to go work on homework or play games. Forty-five minutes later I would come back to put the pasta in and realize that my water had boiled away. We decided it would be really handy to have a thermometer that would make noise when your liquid reached the temperature that you were seeking. And so the Temperature Notification System (or, TNS) was born.

Procedure:
The first steps we took in construction was all of the soldering and wiring. This project required the use of 2 LEDs, a piezo buzzer, a thermometer, and a potentiometer. The simplest part of the TNS was to plug everything up in one nice neat circuit. Here's a picture:

The next step we decided was to create the foam board structure. This is what would hold each of our pieces in place as well as providing an easy to understand interface so that a use could intuitively use our device. Here is our initial foam structure with each piece plugged in. Below is a side view. We wanted to leave the sides open so that the user can see the "guts."

After hooking up all of the circuits and making the foam board structure, it was time to get programming. We needed to be able to set the target temperature by using the potentiometer and an LED. The potentiometer would change the resistance, telling the Arduino what RGB values should be used for the LED.

Next was setting up the actual LED. This was simply a RGB representation of the temperature that the thermometer was reading.

Lastly was the piezo buzzer. We simply wrote a basic code that would sense if the Target and Actual RGB values matched, and if they were within a range of 4, it would set off the buzzer.

We also hand designed another interface that had labels, the title of the device, and control labels.

Here's a picture and a video of our finished product:

Source Code

Conclusion:

Overall this project went smoothly. We didn't really encounter any errors and managed to get everything to run properly. The feedback from the open house where we presented it was all positive. It was great to get to make and show off a practical device.