The Engineering Design Process #2

The Engineering Design Process                                                   By: Noel…           and Daiya 

Identify the problem 

The problem that we identified was that it’s a struggle feeding pets that will eat anything left out for them. You may sometimes be late feeding your pets, or if you are a horrible person, you could forget to feed them completely. 

Explore 

A reasonable solution that we have come up with to make sure your pets don’t starve is to create a machine that does that for you. A servo motor will go off at set times, the food will fall into a bowl and your pets can finally eat. A good idea would be that you can easily set the times that you want in to release food to fit your pet’s eating schedule. It would be nice if you could use the buttons on the microbit to set the time between releasing the food. If we have extra time and we find the coding part enjoyable we could use the LEDs to display a fun image or the time left until the next time your pet needs to eat.  It would be difficult, but we could add a way to premeasure the amount of food given to the pet by having the servo either be timed perfectly to let out only a small amount of food at once or use some sort of measuring cup that dumps the correct amount of food into a bowl.  

Pros:  

  • Your pet can finally eat again.  
  • It seems to be a simple yet fun idea. 
  • There are examples of this already made, so we have something to work from. 

Cons: 

  •  It will be difficult to release a certain amount of food at a time. 
  • Programming might prove to be a challenge considering we aren’t very good at it. 
  • If we had to make a prototype, we will need extra resources to build it. 

The Engineering Design Process

The Engineering design process                                                   By: Noel and Daiya 

Identify the problem 

The problem that we identified was that it’s a struggle feeding pets that will eat anything left out for them. You may sometimes be late feeding your pets, or if you are a horrible person, you could forget to feed them completely. 

Explore 

A reasonable solution that we have come up with to make sure your pets don’t starve is to create a machine that does that for you. A servo motor will go off at set times, the food will fall into a bowl and your pets can finally eat. A good idea would be that you can easily set the times that you want it to release food to fit your pet’s eating schedule. It would be nice if you could use the buttons on the microbit to set the time between releasing the food. 

Pros:  

  • Your pet can finally eat again.  
  • It seems to be a simple yet fun idea. 

Cons: 

  • It will be difficult to release only a specific amount of food at a time. 
  • Programming might prove to be a challenge considering we aren’t very good at it.