Spicefy - An Automated Spice Dispenser

The food world is in need of a resurgence of creativity and efficiency. From the average home cook to the seasoned caterer, time is a valuable resource. Creating a spice blend takes long for home cooks and leads to buying many prebuilt spice mixes that become redundant. Spicefy aims to combat those excess spice mixes purchases with just one device. Spicefy is an autonomous spice storage, grinding, and dispensing device that enables more efficient cooking for both home and professional chefs. 

            After conducting weeks of market research, prospective consumers detailed the most important design requirements as:

• Store a lot of spices at once

• Easy to use and robust

• Dispense spice blends relatively fast and accurate

I focused most of my contribution on all of the electronics and software components, along with conducting all of the analysis for performance and accuracy.

Sub Assemblies

      Spicefy can be broken down into three subassemblies that interact to create value for our customers. Storage was a key product requirement and to satisfy this with a minimal footprint, a tall rectangular cross section was chosen. Building vertically helps to minimize countertop space and maximize spice storage. To store many spices at once, individual storage units were created to store a volume of 9.25 cubic inches, approximately 0.64 cups of spice. The maximum storage of all containers combined was enough to hold 7.68 cups of spices in total.

     To aid with easy collection of spices, the product was designed with a U-shaped funnel to direct the twelve spices into a central area with the collection dish.

    The dispensing subassembly is key to differentiating Spicefy from competing products. A burr grinder allows you to grind whole spices to a desired coarseness. Simultaneously, the grooves on the burr direct the spices downwards from storage, enabling dispensing for both whole and pre-ground spices. Dispensing occurs once the spices are funneled down by the burr grinder to reach a collection base, which sweeps them through an opening to the central funnel, where the collection dish is positioned.

Performance Analysis

   I assessed Spicefy’s performance in two key criteria which were decided by customer research. For robustness, an FEA was conducted on the frame and burr screws to test its ability to handle high torque for grinding. The baseline that these statistics are compared to are values that I predetermined to ensure the product has a long lifecycle and won’t break during cyclic usage. Our goal was to have the structure experience a maximum displacement of 0.5mm when any actuation is active. With all three rails moving and grinding at the same time, the maximum displacement experienced by the frame is 0.2mm and the screw has 0.118mm, which is insignificant at 0.004% of the entire structure. Spicefy can withstand the maximum force possible for it to experience, making it sturdy and robust. 

Accuracy Analysis

      To test its ability to accurately dispense desired quantities of each spice for a blend, repetitive testing was done to measure how accurate grinding and dispensing is to the teaspoon. This was done by dispensing and grinding the spice a specific amount and fine tuning the motor until we accurately dispensed the quantity we desired. After two months of trials and tuning, at a dispensing speed of ⅛ teaspoon per seconds with an accuracy of ½ teaspoon. Compared to market products, Spicefy is two times faster dispensing and six times faster combining all rails. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, our results show that our accuracy of 83% and unique grinding feature makes us competitive with other products on the market due to their lack of grinding and accuracy of 78% on average. Along with that, Spicefy is also cheaper than almost all competitors by $200, making us a competitive product in the market. Our next steps are to improve grinding, dispensing accuracy, and making the storage containers food safe. 

Functional Video

Electronic Architecture

CAD Drawings