Design process for smartshelf

Our team has undertaken a project called "smartshelf" which helps a dieter to keep up with his/her diet & makes suggestions on what to eat and what not to eat using feedback in the form of force applied , light etc

The design process was quite complicated. On paper it all sounded nice & well planned. But, when we tried the first basic thing of generating enough magnetism in an electomagnet, we saw the challenges. First magnetism depends on various factors like power supply voltage, shape of the electromagnet, wire wound on it etc. So, finally we concluded that in order to generate a range of magnetism, we need to used large voltage source and a strong magnet.

Other thing was deciding whether to use RFID tags or not. It would help to identify the food items , but seeing the other disadvantages, we decided to drop the idea. It would have been little difficult to read tags on both food as well as container. Also, good and bad food if placed in the same container, wont leave any use of RFID tags.

We are implementing single user system, due to scope of the project. We would be using handyboard , a 6V battery supply & number of resistors (or a variable resistor) in order to generate variable magnetism.

Exploration Process for Handy Cricket

Assignment 2:

Our team has chosen handy cricket in order to demonstrate a sensing technology. The goal was to use a handy cricket board, communicating with the software program through an interface. Handy board has various sensors attached to it. We tried to demonstrate a number of them like light sensor, pressure sensor etc.

We first tried to exlopre on the software part of the project. How the cricket software works, what are the coding conventions etc. Then we tried to attach all the required components together. ie. attaching interface to PC then cricket to interface & light, motor, sensors to cricket board.
Once, we understood the programming language, it was quite easy to write programs and execute using cricket and attached hardware.

In the beginning, there were problems in interfacing cricket board with PC. Sometimes, software was not recignizing cricket. So, the distance between interface & cricket board was a factor. We also tried switching the interace & cricket a number of times.
Secondly, we tried to run the motor using a procedure. But, it didnt respond. After looking into problem we found that the motor's connections were loose. So, we had to fix that.
There were some issues with pressure sensor. As in, it was not working according to the given set of inputs. But, after reading more about it, we could figure out what the problem was.
We tried to play musical notes on the board. It was new but interesting; as no one was too familiar with the musical notes.