As a class, we were given the task to create a weighing system for a non-profit, dog treat business that employs disabled people. Waggies By Maggie and Friends bakes, weighs, bags, and sells dog treats in order to give people with disabilities a chance to work and learn. We watched a video that was created by a class from Concord High School ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzHC7L0f_lg ) that informed us about the situation. The business is in need of a simpler and more efficient way for their workers to weigh the ideal amount of dog treats. Some of the workers were struggling to fill the bag with the correct weight of treats because they could not read the scale. This made the process of filling one bag much longer than it should have been. Our goal for this project was to create a simpler system that did not require much effort to load the bag of treats.

​

My solution was a scale that was connected to a buzzer, so the user only had to listen to know when the bag was correctly filled. The first step in my process was to write code on Arduino that would make the piezo buzzer work. I found some basic code online that allowed me to figure out how to buzzer worked, and based off of this code I connected it to my scale. The ideal weight for Waggies by Maggie and Friends treat bags is 226-238 grams to be able to sell them. In the end, I was able to program my scale so that it will buzz very slowly when there is less than 226 grams, beep very fast when there is more than 238 grams, and completely stop beeping when there is 226-238 grams on the scale. This provides two forms of feedback to the user: the buzzing lets them know that they need to either keep adding treats or take some out and the silence means they are done with that bag and can move on to the next. 

​

I learned a lot about Arduino coding and circuits from this project. I was very unfamiliar with Arduino before we started this project, but since it was a major part of our solution it taught me a lot. I also had to rework the wires in the scale so that they could be hooked up to a voltage source instead of batteries, this made it so we could convert volts to grams in Arduino. After redoing my scale, I had to connect my Arduino Uno board to a breadboard with the piezo buzzer on it.

 

We were required to test our solutions 30 times before turning in the project in order to get an idea of the average time it might take a worker to use our scale. In the video made by Concord high school, they showed us an example of an employee that took 7 minutes to fill one bag. The mean time to fill my bag was about 27 seconds. Even though this testing was done by a few college students, it is still significantly shorter of a time than 7 minutes. My goal was to create a scale that will be easy for the user to quickly tell when their bag has reached the ideal weight. I believe my solution was very simple and effective. 

​

Here is a link to a YouTube video of my project working: