Music Thyme

Project Description

Music Thyme is a musical spice cabinet that uses sensory interaction to measure spice use and ensure each spice gets back to its rightful place. When you remove a spice from the cabinet, Music Thyme plays a sound and lights up the compartment in which the spice belongs. The purpose is that you'll always put the spice back in its rightful place, especially when sharing kitchen with housemates! Additionally, there is a dial on top of the cabinet that lets you know how many shakes per gram for that spice! All calibrated just for you. Lastly, the audio that's played when you take out the spice allows you to make cool music and have fun while cooking! 

Observational Documentation & Design Process Documentation

When the project topic was first handed out, we all spent sometime observing our own kitchens and the interactions that occur within its environment. We realized that all of our kitchens had a few things in common. Specifically, they all had multiple users, messy spice cabinets, and are often collaborate--multiple people cooking at the same time!

Every person who uses the kitchen has their own sense of order, and when kitchens are shared, it can be hard to find spices at home. A couple of us have personally experienced the frustrations of being unable to find a spice we need, and we all know you can't pause cooking right in the middle! So we decided to first solve that pain point by lighting up individual compartments of a spice cabinet via LEDs so that the user knows where to put it back after removing it. We also all acknowledged that we often cook with our house mates. Extending beyond that, many people do in fact cook together--couples, friends, your parents, siblings, and much more. So we decided to incorporate a fun component to our product, which is when you pick up a spice, a sound is played. We thought it'd be cool to be able to make a song as you're cooking. When picked up, each spice would play a different sound: a drumbeat, trumpet noise, a dog bark, etc. People can make the coolest remixes. Lastly, we noticed that as college students, we often follow recipes in order to cook. When it comes to spices, the recipe always includes how many grams (or tablespoon, etc) you need in the dish. So we decided to add a dial that lets us know how many shakes we need to do to get the same number of grams, without having to get a measuring spoon. All in all, the idea for the most radical spice cabinet to date was born!

In developing the cabinet, we first drew out on paper what our spice cabinet should look like. We tried out various different designs: a spice cabinet where you pulled it out from an unclosed top, a spice cabin that has hinges where you open from two doors on the side, and much more. Eventually, we decided to stick to a simple 6 compartment cabinet that's accessed from the sides (front) instead of the top. This is partly because we realized that people typically put kitchen storages at eye level and/or on the countertop. This side (front) access allows for the Music Thyme to work for either situation. 

For materials, we decided to use econo wood and painted it in a dark, brownish color for aesthetics. We really wanted to design an object that would very very naturally into most kitchens. For the lights, we didn't want to just put in LEDs in plain view, since that would make it look really gaudy and stand out too much in a traditional kitchen, so we decided to add an acrylic layer to cover the lights. The light also needed to defuse evenly, so we chose to frost the acrylic. Additionally, we also imprinted individual icons into each plate, with each icon indicating what sound will be played when a spice is removed from that slot. Lastly, we thought a dial is the easiest way to represent the ideas of grams/shake. So we designed up a circular dial to be put on top of the spice cabinet. The dial is marked with various grams and the arrow will point to which ever number is closest to the grams per shake of the specific spice.

During the whole process, we kept in mind that Music Thyme should be a product that both solved the inconveniences of sharing a spice cabinet with others as well as create a more playful, social experience to make cooking with spices fun with others.

How We Built Music Thyme

1. Laser cut panels according to the attached illustrator files

2.Stain panels via normal wood paint

3. Fix photo resistors into holes in shelves

4. Glue dividers onto shelves using wood glue

5. Glue sides of box using wood glue

6. Glue shelves with dividers into box using wood glue

7. Solder LED ladders. Essentially linked each LED's end to each other and form a ladder shape where the middle is the LED and its positive and ground are linked to other 2 other LED's positive and ground, respectively.

8. secure LED ladders into compartments via tape

9. Glue spacer panels into compartments for acrylic sheets

10. Glue acrylic sheets in compartments

11. Glue lid

Video

Learnings

You can't use arduino's digital input 0 and 1 if you're using Serial.Began(). That kills your loop and nothing will work. Should've read the manual.

Codes and Illustrator Files