Microcontroller

• STM32L476RG Nucleo Board

• We will be using this board to wire up our peripherals and make serial interface connections using UART and SPI interfaces

Peripherals

• ILI9341 TFT LCD

  • External LCD Display will serve as a graphical user interface to notify the user that the pet food bowl is empty.

• ROHS Step Motor

  • Used to rotate a small container placed under the jar (which contains food), dropping food into the bowl. We used interrupts to control this motor.

• HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Sensor 

  • To determine if the pet food jar is empty.

• IR Infrared Sensor 

  • Used to detect if the pet food bowl is empty or not by lighting up at a specific set distance. Also used to detect if the machine is in the process of dropping food or not

Serial Interface Protocols

• UART

  • We used this to print messages to the Termite Display Window, notifying them that their pet's food bowl was empty

• SPI

  • We used this to connect to the ILI9341 TFT LCD monitor, which would also display a message whenever the pet food bowl was empty