ToastMaster 1895
For my junior design course for the fall semester of 2022, I worked with two other electrical and computer engineering majors to design, prototype, test, and deliver a Bop-It like toy. To meet the requirements, we decided upon a "Push It", using a vertical slider to verify a user's push of 'toast' into a bread slot, "Twist It", which uses a rotary encoder to detect if a user had twisted it to a certain degree, and "Shake It", which used a gyroscope/accelerometer to determine if the user had turned the toaster upside down and shaken it. The final project consisted of visual and audio cues to signal to the user their status in winning or losing the game.
For the electronics, we breadboarded the peripherals with the ATMEGA328P. Our initial LCD choice included a colored LCD display, but due to a differing pinout that required further testing and current resources, we decided on a monochrome one. We also decided to switch from using the chip's ADC for the audio to an MP3 module with an integrated SD Card Reader to reduce the need for additional memory peripherals and tedious amplification of the audio.
Since we had not finalized our final form factor before our PCB design, we decided to make it as small as possible, resulting in around 2.5 x 2.5in. We put headers towards the border of the board so that the components could be easily added and removed for testing, and kept the decoupling capacitors close as possible to the power lines.
Our software was written in C, and our core logic consisted of a loop that consisted of a menu function for the player to select between different modes of playing. Other functions were called in this loop, such as our playGame() function, where a random generator and a timing function was used to determine whether a player won after a certain number of actions.
We did multiple iterations of our enclosure to ensure that the electronics could adhere to their desired positions. We designed the toaster in a vector-based software, and lasercut it out of hardboard. Metal inserts were added along with our toast so that they could guide the bread back to the surface and prevent it from getting stuck in our spring system.
Here is a video of our toaster