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Proposal

Temperature

Design

The Kidish


Thermistor


Original Concept

Now that we had working ranges, I wanted to relate them to actual temperatures.

I researched proper cooking temperatures and food temperatures. While the temperature of the food is important regarding not wanting to burn the child’s mouth, bacteria is also a concern.

Perishable food should never be kept at temperatures between 40°F and 140°F for more than 2 hours. Bacteria can grow well at these temperatures and may grow to levels that could cause illness.

The idea was to have the light not only reflect the emptier of the food regarding pleasurable eating but also indicate when the food may no longer be safe to eat due to possible bacteria growth.

  • Red light for food that is too hot to eat
    • Blinks as it is cooling down
  • Green light for food that is safe to eat.
    • Blinks as temperature starts getting too cold
  • Blue light when food reached temperature when bacteria begins growing
    • Blinks when food as been at bacteria growth temperature for an hour

Troubleshooting

Pollie - Initially, during the week I got serial read out from the thermistors. By the weekend the serial read out stopped. Songul worked with the boards for several hours

Songul - I also wired a new board and tried different resistors and switched to different computers and serial cables but couldn't get anything through serial. I programmed a new pic and used another set of thermistors but that did not work either. As the time run out we had to continue with rest of the project so I moved into other things such as building a stand for the dish and helping Olivia and Quanya to put boards into the dish. Below link are the codes that we used for testing and TRI Color LED temperature indicator through thermistors. The thermistors are from SparkFun.com - 10K Thermistor.

Pollie - As time ran out, I tried the thermistors again but at this time I could not get serial output from the board at all. I had others in the firmware look at the board and they could find nothing wrong. I was not able to get “Hello world” to come out. I wired a completely new out of the package board. Used a different serial cable, different computers, but to no avail.

In the end, thermistor had to be scraped due to lack of time and the fact we could not get a basic board working.