Project: Lazier Susan

Counter Culture:

The kitchen is a unique part of every house and is a central gathering point for everyone. Whether eating a meal, doing chores, sharing stories or doing homework, the kitchen provides an inviting haven to stay. With such an inviting space comes a great door of opportunity for some ingenious inventions.

I was assigned the task of designing and prototyping a novel kitchen object with any or all of the elements I have used in previous labs.

Observation:

I began by observing my own kitchen at school as well as at home. I noticed while eating dinner with my family and asking for someone to "pass me the ____" that there was a place for improvement. While Lazy Susan's exist already, I thought it would be nice to improve the existing model. Currently, a Lazy Susan spins when the user pushes the circle in a clockwise or counter clockwise direction. But what if I could make that even easier? And make people believe that they have special powers?

The Design in my Head:

And so I began to design my Lazier Susan. It would still be a circular disk moving both directions but taking out the pushing aspect. The device would be controlled by hovering your hand over a sensor to make it go in the direction you pleased!

What's so Great About It?

Upon these thoughts I realized that this device could be used for more than just the kitchen table. If your kitchen comes with a large island, the Lazier Susan would serve as a nice piece to avoid walking to the other side. And why stop at the kitchen? This device would work very well in places like the robotics lab where many people are hovered around a counter and pieces are scattered everywhere. No more wasting time to walk to your needs, just have someone place it on the Lazier Susan and then hover over the desired direction pad and let it come to you!

The Dirty Work:

We started by getting just the breadboard and code to do what we wanted before adding the actual pieces. Using our previous knowledge of servo motors and photo resistors, we developed code to make the motor go one way when covering one photo resistor and vice versa.

Next, we took a piece of plywood and cut out a large circle. We then attached it to the servo using glue and screws and attached that to a wooden base for stability.  

Because the diameter of the circle was so large, we wanted to give it more support for weight so we decided to construct platforms with wheels so when it spun the wheels would help it turn.

We then disconnected the photo resistors from the breadboard and placed them on the platform. We made them visually more appealing by creating foamcore platforms, one on either side, so users could understand how it works.

Demo:

Problems:

At first, our design included buttons and a musical tone that played as it spun. However, the delays on the song conflicted with the delays we wanted to give the circle so we decided to take it out and improve the interaction with users by making the buttons photo resistors instead. 

The plywood we used unfortunately was not completely flat and therefore we ran into problems as it was spinning. Instead of a steady spin, the device did lots of wobbling. To fix this problem, we included the wheels to support the weight and lessen the wobbling. 

In order to keep the circle still until the photo resistor is covered, we did a "calibration" that finds the average light from the resistor when first started and then when it is given less light than the average it tells it to spin. 

Full Code