Leverage Your Beverage

Front View
Top View
The Complete Setup

Inspiration

Leverage Your Beverage was inspired by the common challenge of staying hydrated while on the road. Our goal is to improve the lives of drivers with an easy-to-use spill-proof hydration-station.

What it does

Leverage Your Beverage is a fully automated stabilized cupholder that uses 3-axis acceleration information to tilt a cup to the perfect angle to negate the effect of sudden movements. We envision applications in environments where sudden acceleration may be mixed with open containers, such as while driving.

How we built it

Our system is composed of software and hardware components: The essence of the hardware is the stabilized cupholder, built using state-of-the-art Cardboard Construction technology featuring tape (it's Blue!) and zip-ties. Servo motors drive the two axes of movement. The bulk of the software is run on a Raspberry Pi, with the important purpose of computing servo angles from acceleration data. The code for these real-time calculations was written from scratch using Python. The other element of software is the servo control, run on an Arduino. The Arduino takes the computed angles from the Python code over the serial port and sets servo positions.

Challenges we ran into

The math behind the angle calculations was fairly complex to perfect and to optimize to run in real-time. Additionally, communication between the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino needed to be extremely low-latency, which required optimization of the Arduino code to be very responsive to serial inputs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the complete system we designed from the bottom-up in less than 24 hours,.

What we learned

On the software side, we learned about physics calculations for converting acceleration vectors into angles for a gimbal system as well as optimizing software for real-time low-latency.

What's next for Leverage Your Beverage

The current prototype system is built from cardboard and lacks a polished feel. To continue the idea of Leverage Your Beverage, we plan on redesigning the hardware to be created from 3D-printing, Laser-cutting, or other proper manufacturing techniques. Additionally, the angle calculations can be tweaked for a smoother response.