General Engineering Introduction/CDIO/Minimal Conceive

CONCEIVING AND ENGINEERING SYSTEMS

Idea
To design a smart pet food dispenser that will not only allow for user friendly pet feeding but also ease the struggles of pet dieting (MT).

Problem Statement
Design a pet food controller using RFID Tags and a mechanically operated food bowl rotator that will allow for all pet owners to feed their pets at any time of the time by simply dictating how much food to dispense and at what times feeding is to given (MT).

Market/Customer needs
We had originally planned for a multi pet, food dispenser. After a few weekly meetings and looking into the design and implementation of a multi pet food storage system I knew that it would've been well beyond the scope of work. I decided that for a much more feasible and cost effective pet food controller I needed to alter my design for a single pet feeder (MT).

Factors that set the context of the requirements

 * Customer Needs (MT)
 * Cost of Materials (MT)
 * Time/Duration of Project (MT)
 * Aesthetics (MT)
 * Practicality (MT)
 * Marketability (MT)
 * Available Resources (MT)

Competitors and benchmarking information
When I was first tasked with this project I immediately researched all and every related projects that had been completed. Since this is quite a unique project I luckily found very little if any other projects that were similar to the pet food controller. However, I did find on Instructables that someone had created basically the same project that I was tasked to design. This was not a major problem for a couple of reasons; one of them being he had documented his design process fairly well and I was able to gain a decent amount of insight as to what I wanted to complete and the second was that I noticed he had done little to no marketing on his product, which meant that the market was still wide open (MT).

Ethical, social, environmental, legal and regulatory influences
In terms of ethics there are not many issues that I felt necessary to address except that end product needs to be 99% reliable because I could not in good conscious market a product that could potentially effect the health of an animal (MT).

Necessary system functions

 * Utilize RFID Tags to distribute food to specific animals (MT)
 * Distribute proportioned amounts of food to maintain healthy animal diets (MT)
 * Maintain a low cost budget (MT)
 * Ease of troubleshooting mechanical, electrical, and cleanliness issues (MT)

Trade-offs among concepts

 * Multi-tube food storage tank vs. a single food storage tank for each individual pet (MT)
 * Multi-tube food storage would require a common funnel to the food bowls with a mechanically operated rotary screw feeder for each tank (MT)
 * Single food storage tank would allow for a simpler prototype which could then lead to improvements and ultimately a multi-tube storage tank (MT)
 * One final product for multiple pets vs. one final product for each individual pet (MT)