week01

Final project

Find a project

This week we need to find a potential final project. I want a final project that will be useful for me or somebody else. I have started looking around for things that will make my life easier. For couple of days, I looked for ideas on the internet and ask people around me. The Ideas from them are not appropriate as part of the Fab Academy final project. The reason why I rejected the ideas is because they don't use multiple digital tools that we will learn during the Fab Academy class or they were fully mechanical, fully electrical, too small or too big. It's important to choose a project that motivates me and possible to do it during the 20 weeks of Fab Academy class.

One morning, I had the eureka moment. I will explain to you where my idea came from in detail just below.

	This is my fiance's cat and its name is Black Jack. He is one and a half years old and since he is a baby he likes to go to the bathroom and have some fresh water.
	So that morning and like all the other morning, I saw Black Jack like that near the bathtub who is waiting for us for fresh water.
	Several times during the day, not just in the morning, somebody open the tap and the cat can drink.

The problem with that solution is we waste water while he drinks and sometimes we forget to turn off the tap because we do something else. The other problem, we need to turn on and off every time that the cat wants to drink. The cat meows nonstop if we don't open it. I don't know why but they don’t drink enough water if we only give a bowl of water. To avoid health problems we give the bowl of water and the tap water when he asks for it.

We received this little fountain for Christmas, and my fiance and I never saw the cat using it. Cats in general like fresh water and I presume that it is the main problem because the little fountain just makes a little waterfall without cooling it. Another part of the problem is waterfalls are not higher enough to look like a bathtub tap. When the fountain is running out of water, it makes a lot of noises and if we don't feel it up faster it can break the pump. The fountain is always on, so again during the night we ear the waterfall and the pump.

I did the research of different kinds of fountains and food dispenser for cats on the market and I always found something wrong about the product. The main reasons are:

The water is not cold.
The waterfall is not high enough.
The fountain doesn't have the low water level indicator.
The waterfall is always on.
The fountain doesn't have an automatic food dispenser.

Project idea

My idea of my final project is to make an automatic water and food dispenser. The main reasons why I chose this project, are explained in "find a project" section. I have a water dispenser issues but I realized that I have almost the same issue with the food. Somebody needs to be at home to feed the cat. So I decide to add the food dispenser in my solutions. The best way to fix two issues with one product. Some other reason why I choose this project is because I want to learn all the mechanical design software and tools during the Fab Academy class. In this project, I have a lot of different parts to design so it's perfect for learning. I want a project who look professional and look finished. The last reason is I will make a happy cat. This project is separated in two parts, the water dispenser and the food dispenser. I will describe shortly some features of different parts.

Water dispenser

a cold waterfall
low water level indicator
a higher waterfall compared to other model on the market
a proximity sensor to start the waterfall
an automatic night light

Food dispenser

hours set for food distribution
big enough to contain multiple portions of food
an automatic night light