Sir Mix-a-Drink

Inspiration

We are all really good at mixing sodas and energy drinks. While it's fun to have such skill, it gets tiring to have to constantly mix drinks for people at parties. We created Sir Mix-a-Drink to free us up by becoming the perfect drink mixer.

What it Does

Amazon Echo listens for drink requests and relays them to Sir Mix-a-Drink who then combines ingredients in the proper quantities.

How we Built It

Amazon Echo/Alexa, diaphragm pumps, and Particle Photon. The photon digital pins drive several NPN Transistors, which in turn power the Diaphragm pumps. A diode (we used an LED) is shunted between each of the motor terminals and the +12v rail in order to protect against transient voltage spikes due to motor inertia.

Challenges we ran Into

• Plumbing.

• We went through several sets of transistors. The first were not rated for the motor current, and the second were PNP instead of NPN due to a Datasheet mixup.

• Mysterious microcontroller failures.

• Plumbing.

• The Javascript API for photon broke when used on Lambda. We had to improvise.

• Did we mention plumbing?

Accomplishments that we're Proud Of

• We made a voice controlled drink mixer in one weekend.

What we Learned

• We learned how to hook up all of our favorite hacking toys.

• We learned to just take the L's and move on.

• We learned that big W's can come after a long string of L's.

What's Next for Sir Mix-a-Drink

• More recipes (from the cloud)

• More drink containers

• Level sensors and drink supply management

• Interactive menu with nutritional information

Built With

• Photon

• amazon-alexa

• node.js

• caffeine

• diaphragm-pumps

Submitted To

• SpartaHack 2016i

Created By

• Developed Alexa voice control system and achieved integration with the Particle Photon. Did a lot of plumbing and electronics procurement. Made (questionable) architectural decisions and served as a voice of (un)reason(ability) within the team. Nathan Breitsch.

• Worked mainly on getting the electronics wired up and running, as well as creating circuits suitable for testing our code properly. Also coded most of the code used on the Particle Photon, including our string parsing algorithm for distinguishing orders. Jiwoo Jang

• Worked on wiring and circuit design, and construction. Did a lot of the plumbing. Richard Li

• Provided Hardware assistance- Circuit design, wiring, component selection, etc. as well as some construction and microcontroller programming. Evan Daykin