Pill Counter (Capstone Project)

Problem Statement

To design and prototype a machine that automates pill counting with minimal human operation.

Final Product

The final Design performed the following steps:

Pick up a bottle
Remove the child-proof cap
Empty the bottle
Count the number of pills in the bottle
Refill the bottle
Recap the bottle

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My Responsibilities

Counting of Pills

My first task was to count the pills after they had been dumped out of the bottle. To do this, I used break beam sensors and gravity. I first created a hole at the bottom of a funnel that was 1.5x the diameter of the pill we were creating this for. I then used vibrational motors that turn on once the first pill passes the beam break sensors, to agitate the pills to make them all fall through. This allowed all of the pills to fall through the funnel 1 at a time. As they were falling, they would pass 2 break beam sensors, for redundancy. I used Arduino to code a counter that increased by one each time both sensors increased by one, and if the sensors had a different count, the system would prompt a recount. I experimentally found that once, the sensors had gone at least 7 seconds without recording an additional count, the counting period could be finished, and the bottle could be refilled.

Bottle refill

The refilling of the bottle was an especially precarious task. The pills had to be held until all counting was done and the bottle was back in place and the mechanism had to be able to get out of the way of the bottle that moves up and down during the completion of other tasks. To do this, the design that I landed on was the one pictured above. This consists of a bottomless cup with a removable bottom. Both the cup and the bottom are attached to 2 separate racks that are driven by one pinion gear. The rack of the removable bottom is slightly shorter than the rack of the bottomless cup. This way, once the cup is full, the gear drives the entire cup forward until right before it is above the bottle. At this point, the rack of the bottom is not in contact with the gear, so only the bottomless cup moves forward to be directly over the bottle. All of the pills fall into the bottle, and then the gear pulls back the cup. The cup then contacts the bottom and pulls it backwards as well until both racks are in contact with the gear again, and the cup returns to its original position.

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