Bubble Tea

Interaction product design

Meet The Team

Tianke Li

Designer, I am more focused on straw and cup design, light guide design, code for receive part

LeAnn Huang

Engineer, I am more focused on base and cup design, code for sent part, circuit design

Description

Life can be a mess and full of conflicts, but we feel relaxed when we finally come back home and drink a cup of bubble tea. So we combine bubble tea and life together, we abstract all the bad things happened in one day into 4 angry faces and all of them will disappear when we drink the bubble tea and turn out to be sweet and simple things like bubbles. What we want to express is life is like drinking a bubble tea, Even though lots of bad things happened in one day but in the end life is easy.

System Diagram

The design of the bubble tea can be divided into 2 parts. The first part is the straw part. We add a LED light strip into it. The second part is the cup and the base. And we made the tight junction （Six columns being inserted into the corresponding holes) of these 2 parts and use 3D printers to print it. and add connectors to it for transcend the signal.

The straw part is comprised with LED light strip, feather board, PVA and PLA. The base part is also comprised with LED bulbs,PVA and PLA, and Acrylic light guide.

The two parts light up in their own ways when separate, once connected, the lights in the base will extinguish one by one and the lights in the straw will light up one by one with the same time interval.

Implementation

For the part of the straw, there is only one white bulb lighting up at first. When the straw was put down, the circuit is connected to the base via the connecters and the signal sent from the feather board(A2 port) from the base is received by the A2 port on this feather board. Then the light strips inside the straw will illuminate one by one from bottom to top using Adafruit_NeoPixel library, simulating the process of bubbles being sucked up in the bubble milk tea. And there is a usb port exposed outside to change the code inside and the lip connected to the straw could be open if the battery needs to be recharged.

For the part of the base, there are four white bulbs(connected to port 2,3,4,5) lighting up in a circular way at first and the bulbs is hidden inside the base and light is guided towards the eyes of the angry bosses using acrylic light guide. When the straw is inserted, signal sent from feather board in the straw through A3 port is received by the A3 port in base, the four small bulbs are extinguished one by one with the time interval of the light strip.

Schematics Layouts

These two feather boards is connected by 2 connector, as we need two-direction signal, the pins in the same left all need to be connected to A2, and the pins in the middle need to be connected to GND, and the pins in the right need to be connected to A3.

Software

1.FUSION 360:

We made 3D model using fusion 360, in order to have accurate measurement, we made 3 different version and gradually find out the most proper offsets.

2.Arduino IDE:

We wrote our code in Arduino, and we have two Arduino files, one for sent part, one for receive part. They all use "if(signal == low/high)" to send signal.

(Click on each picture to see all the pictures )

3.Laser cut

We drew AI vector file to laser cut the acrylic board, we laser cut the lid, base( angry faces) and light guides.

Gallery

Video

https://youtu.be/EZzpQ8juLYY

Process

1. We first want to test our idea to fix the connector and we made a simple one with foam. This have limited feather and in poor quality. We find out that we need 2 different layer to fix one connect.

2. Our second iteration is made of cardboard, and measure the height and width. And we use wood sticks to connect the base part and straw part, we find out 2mm sticks may be too thin to prevent the connect part from bounding up and down.

3. Our third iteration is made of 3d print, we found out the connection part actually works well, but we need more accurate offset to fit them in position.

4. Our forth iteration is also made of 3d print, we found out we forgot to estimate the height of the wire, and we found it hard to close the lid when circuit is installed.