Ice Breakers. Literally.

Inspiration

We were inspired by the ice idea of playing ice breaker games by literally breaking ice with this ice breaker machine.

What it does

A knife (or any utensils for that matter) is connected to a disc, which is connected to the motor. When the user(s) press the button on the mobile application, it would send a signal to the bluetooth transmitter which activate the ice breaker.

How we built it

Step 1: Motor. We went through a variety of motors to decide on the final one. A Servo motor is definitely too small, so we went with the good old yellow DC motors. In order for the knife to cut into the ice, a semi-upwards motion is required, without compromising the rotational motion of the motor. Therefore, we made a disc and support to be attached to the motor.

Step 2: Bluetooth. Since we wanted to control it remotely, we had to find a way to connect the ESP32 board to our mobile phones. Hence, we used Arduino IDE to connect and pair our devices to the ESP32, which will then activate the motor.

Step 3:

Challenges we ran into

Our mobile application was not developed in sync with the bluetooth initially. Although there were functions available on the application developer and in online tutorials, it was ultimately incompatible with the Arduino 101 board, which we initially worked with. After making the switch to an ESP32, there was simply not enough time to reintegrate the application with the ESP32 board.
Due to the lack of resources, it was difficult to construct the scaffold of the motor to support the knife and move in the required motion. We had to scramble to find cardboard, pins, blue tack, tape, screws, etc. The materials were not sturdy enough to support the knife, so the enter system will collapse due to its weight. It was also difficult to make the components stick together while not affecting the motion due to friction.
Bluetooth was especially hard to pair up with as we were unfamiliar with Arduino 101 and ESP32 boards. We had spent over 10 hours simply trying to figure out how to pair the device to the board. After pairing up, there was also the difficulty of making the signals become flags that can be used to control the motor.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to sync the control panel with the bluetooth transmitter, making it possible for interaction between the control panel and the ice breaker machine.