Final project

Due dates

  • Project teams / plans: Monday, 12/11 by class time
  • Final demonstrations: Tuesday, 12/19 3:30-5:30pm
  • Final writeups: Wednesday, 12/20 11:59pm

Project guidance

Your final project will combine many of the things you’ve learned in the course to build some kitchen or food-related device.

Here are some ideas to choose from:

  • Use a crockpot (or hot water kettle) as a yogurt maker or sous-vide machine. In both cases, you’ll need to maintain the water at a given temperature for an extended period of time. The user should be able to enter a time and temperature, and the food will cook!

  • Build a smart cooking thermometer to alert you when food has cooked to a safe temperature. The user should be able to enter a food (e.g., pork, chicken, etc), and the thermometer will track the progress of cooking and raise an alert when the safe minimum time + temperature has been met.

  • Build a mug that keeps a drink warm.

  • A system that tracks the performance of your refrigerator/freezer and displays a variety of data points on a web page. You might track the warmest/coldest the fridge has been, the number of times it has been opened, and the power consumption.

  • A kitchen scale that reads you the recipe one step at a time and checks that you’re putting in the right amount of each ingredient (like the Thermomix but without the mix and cook parts)

You may propose a variation on one of these projects if you’d like to do something different, but we’ll need to make sure all of the parts are easy to acquire.

Project/team selection

You may choose your own team of 4; feel free to use Piazza to reach out to your classmates if you’re looking for partners. Your project plan should be an email to me (Prof. Bell) including the following:

  • A paragraph describing what you would like to do
  • A block diagram showing how the main pieces will fit together

I only need one email from each team, but be sure to cc your teammates.

Final writeup

Your project writeup should be a PDF file with the following sections:

  • A description of what you’re trying to build and what problem it’s designed to solve. This will be similar to your project proposal, but should be refined and updated based on what you actually did.

  • An explanation of how your system works. This is really hard to do well, so take time to plan your approach and have your whole team review it. A few things to help you plan and evaluate this section: – Have you given your reader an overview of how all the pieces fit together? – Are all of the pieces explained? – Have you used diagrams and figures to explain your design? Schematics, block diagrams, state machines, timelines, and other graphics are often more effective than words. – Do you provide transitions between sections so the reader can follow your description? A good writeup is like a good photo tour of a house: you see the details, but you also have a sense of where you are in the house.

  • Some appropriate measurements to prove that your system is working as designed. For example, if it’s designed to regulate temperature, show us some temperature plots.

  • An evaluation of your design. What works well? What could be improved? If you had another month to work on it, what would you do?

  • Your code files attached to the end. Make sure to include server code, ESP32 code, and any plotting code you wrote. Remember to use a monospace font!