Drink Mixer

So you're loading up the drink mixer here, I see. Automated drink mixer. What is it called? The automated drink mixer. Okay, and so we have here Coca-Cola, sweet tea, Sprite, and lime juice? Lime, lemon-lime juice. Lemon-lime juice. Yeah, and grenadine. And grenadine. And there's a glass on a turntable underneath. And a push-button menu. And do you index the glass to start out with? So the glass always starts out at the front like this. There's a little bit of leeway. So this, every time it passes a black strip of tape, it... Oh, there's a photo sensor over there. So there's an IR photo sensor. So it fires the inch zero interrupt vector on the rising edge. So as long as you start without getting a count on this black strip of tape, as long as this is past the sensor, then you can start it anywhere. Okay, and so we have the Shirley Temple, Arnold Palmer, Coke and Sprite, Coke and lime. Very good. Strictly an alcoholic. And solenoid valves on each of the containers. All right, can we see it run? Yes, what would you like? Oh, I'd like a Coke and lime, please. Okay. And so it's putting the Coke in. Now it's putting the lime in. And now it's serving it up. How very cool. Instruction here. You have a turntable, and then it's a friction motor on it. Yep, and this is a 2-inch wheel connected to a 70 RPM motor, connected to a 14-inch Lazy Susan just from Walmart. So that spins this at about 10 RPM. So you've got a lot of torque. A lot of torque. And it's slow enough as to not spill any of the liquid or knock over the glass. And because you have feedback through the photo sensor there, you don't have to – slip doesn't matter to you. Slip doesn't matter as long as its traction remains. Right, as long as you can actually torque it, which it seems like you can't. And this is PVC pipe holding the bottles up. And because they're in the center, the force of the bottles themselves is holding everything together. It's pushing it all together. It all just leans against this piece right here. And you've got these cute little solenoid valves. Now there must be some fairly heavy drivers down here on the circuit board. So I see the big transistors there. Power transistors here and then protection diodes and capacitors right there. Because they have a minimum PSR pressure requirement of 3 PSI. The valves. Yeah. And so that really wasn't – when our bottles got about halfway through, that's kind of when that reached that threshold and it would stop flowing. And so what we did is we modified them slightly. And the way they work is that there's a piston on the spring that, when the valves aren't activated, is pushing the gasket closed inside. And then when they're activated, the piston gets pulled back by the magnetic field. And then if the pressure is great enough, it flows through that. But what we did is we superglued the piston to the gasket so when you activate it – Oh, it pulls it back. It pulled it back, yeah. That's clever. So that kind of got rid of that. There's still a very slight minimum PSI, but it's much, much less than that. And apparently it's working for the Coke because you just pulled half of the volume of that Coke out of there and it's just fine. I'm going to do a Sprite and Grenadine now. Mm-hmm. Okay, go right ahead. Okay. Very cool. And how are you getting the volumes? Is it by time or is it by – So as Austin described, we modified each of the valves. So actually they all have slightly different flow rates now. So that was actually pure testing. So they all actually have different times. And our dispense function actually dispenses the same amount each time you call it, despite what drink you're making. So we just call it over again. So for this one, our bigger containers dispense a fourth of what we want in the 16-ounce glass. So we call that four times and then we kind of have a dash of function for the smaller mixers. Let me get up over the top where I can see the smaller ones. Yeah, yeah. There they are. Okay. Very good.