ECE 110/120 Honors Lab Section : Smart Thermal Cup 2.0

By Jumbo Jiang xutaoj2 (ECE 110) and Edward Guan yuxuang3 (ECE 120)

Project Proposal

Introduction

Statement of Purpose

Have you ever been in a situation like this: You get a cup of nice hot or ice cold coffee to enjoy. However, after you focus on your work for 15 minutes, you find your coffee is in an unpleasantly warm condition. You can either choose to drink unpleasantly or put your coffee into microwave oven or refrigerator and wait until you get a cup of extremely hot or freezing coffee. And this is why we want to design a device that can control the liquid in a cup at a specifically required temperature combined with heating and cooling functions. And it is not advisable to treat our project as a heater or refrigerator.

Background Research

Professor Schmitz said it’s an interesting project to continue to work on.

Design Details

Well, well, well. It’s Smart Thermal Cup 2.0 right. So what happened to 1.0? Eh… we decided to redesign the project to make it better in every aspect.

Parts

1. Arduino (I guess UNO might not enough, I don’t know)
2. Wi-fi module
3. LEDs
4. Ribbon Sensor / Potentiometer + Machined Knob
5. Thermoelectric cooler (I want TEC-12710 this time)
6. Liquid cooler (Heat Sink + Fan is definitely not enough!)
7. Copper Cup (Maybe other heat conductive material cup?)
8. Wires!
9. Relays! (Controlling high current circuit is not kidding!)
10. 3D printed shells (Actually we are not satisfied with the material)
11. Processing Machine Tool (Maybe)
12. What’s the name of that that that eh… that is waterproof and is good at insulating heat?
13. Infrared Temperature Sensor
14. Microphone
15. There must be something else that we need

Possible Challenges

1. How to design a really satisfying human interface
2. Wi-fi module set up & usage
3. Size / Weight of the whole project
4. Safety protection
5. Heat dissipation
6. Power control 110 AC to 12V/5V DC
7. PCB design maybe?
8. Sound comparison?
9. Mobile app programming?

Block Diagram