Candy Dispenser: PComp Midterm

Hanyi and I were paired to come up with a project for our PComp midterms. The topic given to us was Halloween, and we could design anything with an input and output. For our first meeting, Hanyi and I realized that both our cultures never really celebrated Halloween and that all we knew about this celebration was that people indulged in some kind of horror and bought candies. It did not take us much time to then convince ourselves to design a candy dispenser for the midterm project. 

Our initial sketches were just rough ideas of how we percieved our dispenser would look like. Both of us did agree that we could make use of a servo motor to stop the flow of the candies with some variable input. Our initial idea was to use a microphone that could detect the sound of screaming and change the direction of the servomotor. We soon went material shopping and purchased colorful transparent acrylic sheets from Canal plastics, microphones from Amazon Prime and candies from Dylans Candy Bar.

We soon started building the circuit for the microphone as an input and the servo motor as our output. On programming the code on Arduino IDE, we realized that the microphone was either too sensitive or non-reactive to the different sounds in the surroundings. This risked our idea of moving the servo motor from 0 to 180 degrees and back to 0 degrees. We then decided to make use of a pushbutton as our digital input to move the servo. Having a push button, made the design more secure and reliable to drop candy from the dispenser. 

Hanyi then put the three walls of the box together, while I constructed the shape of the pipe at 60 degrees to redirect the candy towards the user. We made our own funnel that had its bottom radius match the pipe’s radius so that the candy can drop without any interruptions. 

Hanyi then laser cut a small whole on the front side of the box through which we displayed our pushbutton with a text saying ‘ Push button for candy ‘. He also laser cut a small arc on the top lid to let the wire cable of the Arduino to pass through. And a hole was also cut to place the funnel to the top of the lid from which we could re-fill the candy.

Our final candy dispenser looked colorful and was thankfully functional despite the change in idea of not using a microphone and using a push-button instead.