Week 1 Post 1

In Lab Post

This is the first week of Engineering Design Lab III. We chose to create an Automatic Pet Feeder for this design lab and invested most of our in class time into brainstorming ideas of how we want to approach creating the feeder. We went through many ideas but eventually settled with the design drawn below:

In this design we plan on having the pet food inside the empty water gallon. The water gallon is attached to a PVC pipe that allows the food to roll. Midway into the PVC pipe, there will be a little gate mechanic that will be closed unless it is feeding time for the pets. When the gate opens, the food will start to fall down the PVC pipe and fall onto the tray. There will also be an Ultrasonic Sensor that will be looking down on the food tray. When the food reaches a certain height, the Ultrasonic sensor will sense this and cause the gate to close off. 

This is another part of the design that is in charge of putting water inside a bowl to compliment the food. This is made with a water pump that is commonly used for transferring water between fish tanks. It works by squeezing a ball looking lump on the tube to allow for water to pass through which we will use an NXT motor to accomplish.