This term’s first challenge was to design and build a robotic assistive device to help with some problem.
The robot we made was a pill dispensing robot for use with patients with either a mental illness or a an inability to take the correct dosage of their medication at the right time. The pill pusher stores medication into easy to use capsules with capacity to hold a number of individual pills. We decided to make the product as simple possible while still retaining appropriate function.
Research:
We conducted research into whether or not our product was already a reality. When we found that it was we researched on how to make our version our own.
https://www.tabtimer.com.au/Automated-Pill-Dispensers
https://medium.com/@medipense/2017-the-year-of-the-iot-automated-pill-dispenser-ca1d41f0592b
The brain storming that we did was mostly planning of the design of the product. With the pill pusher as our first and best idea, we decided to continue and plan out a design. The other ideas we came up with were a form of hearing aid and
We only made one device, we did however plan it out thoroughly gaining a list of materials beforehand and assembling it in sections.
We completed the build early and spent the remaining time fine tuning and trouble shooting. One of the problems faced was the machine dispensing more capsules than necessary.
This problem was fixed with a dob of hot glue to make an improvised stopper for the capsules and a stand to lift the device. Another problem encountered was the winch breaking, the anchor point that attached to the block had come undone. We fixed this and reinforced the anchor point so as to better hold the cord. There was some human error during the repair.
The end result of this project was a perfectly functioning robot that did exactly what it intended to do. The improvement that could have been made is all quality of life, such as locks, a better sound alarm or more advanced timer. The time management after we finish the build in the second lesson could have been better and used to add some of those improvements. However as mentioned before this time was not wasted and instead used fine tune the Pill pusher.
