Love is in the Air

Inspiration

Valentines day and love, also chocolates It also integrates a mechanical catapult system to a facial recognition system in a camera, use Bluetooth, Arduino, and more.

What it does

Fully autonomous system that loads M&Ms, finds the target with facial recognition, do math and physics to find optimal release angle and spring compression, and launch the chocolate to the user. It retracts the catapult automatically as well. The website allows users to have access to the sweet chocolate without even moving out of the couch. They can sinmply log into the app, request their preferred chocolate color, and it will impediately by delivered to them with minimal effort.

How we built it

Mechanical system was built using wood and intense physics. From energy conservation, projectile motion, to distance and height estimation from image data, it is based off theory and it has quite impressive accuracy. Some mounts were 3D printed. Arduino and ESP32 CAM are used, as well as a Bluetooth module and web development.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out how to use ESP32, especially the issues we had with camera throughout the event. Bluetooth also caused difficulty in communication between devices, but in the end worked out as a pipeline between Arduino with all actuator control and ESP with all image recognition data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a design that requires so many components, interfaces, and integration. This design covers almost anything from pure mechanical (wood working, 3D printing, projectile motion), mechatronics (4+ motors used) and pure software (facial recognition, image processing, web development).