TikiBot

Touchscreen BarBot software for auto-dispensing mixed drinks. Runs under Linux on a Raspberry Pi or Udoo, using DC motor controllers over I2C, to activate pumps and valves to dispense ingredients.

TikiBot Lives! It was a great success at my friend's Tiki themed party.

Standard Drinks List

The default configuration is for a 12-feed TikiBot. It expects the following ingredient feeds:

Meyer's Dark Rum
Appleton's Signature Blend
Meyer's Platinum White Rum
Lemonheart 151 Rum
Lime Juice
Lemon Juice
Orange Juice
Pineapple Juice
Passion Fruit Syrup
Sugar Syrup
Angostura Bitters
Grenadine

The following Tiki recipes can be made from those:

Beachcomber's Gold
Chief Lapu Lapu
Hurricane
Planter's Punch
Shrunken Skull
Tiger Shark
Trader Vic Grog
Zombie

The following non-alcoholic juice drinks can also be made:

Orange Juice
Pineapple Juice
Pineapple Orange Juice
Tropical Punch

Hardware

This software has been tested with the following hardware:

Udoo Neo ( Udoo.org )
7" 800x480 Touchscreen HDMI display
3 Adafruit DC Motor Featherwings ( Adafruit.com )
12 Small self-priming pumps ( TrossenRobotics.com )
12 Normally Closed solonoid valves ( Amazon.com )

Each DC Motor controller handles up to 4 feeds. Each motor controller will need to have a consecutive different I2C address. You can alternately use the following DC motor controllers without changing any code:

Adafruit DC & Stepper Motor HAT for Raspberry Pi ( Adafruit.com )
Adafruit Motor/Stepper/Servo Shield for Arduino v2 ( Adafruit.com )

It should be trivial to use a Raspberry Pi instead of the Udoo Neo. Probably the easiest configuration would be to use a Raspberry Pi with a few stacked DC Motor HATs.

Each feed is a paired pump and valve, wired in parallel. Each pump/valve combo should be wired and plumbed as follows:

The polarity of the wiring is irrelevant for the linked pumps and valves. For them, either polarity will result in the forward pump action with the valve open.

The pumps-valve pairs can be seated into a ring of Pump Wedges that can be 3D printed from the model STLs/PumpWedge12.stl (for a 12 feed ring) or STLs/PumpWedge16.stl (for 16 feed rings). A corresponding Feed Guide model can be found as STLs/FeedGuide12.stl or STLs/FeedGuide16.stl. The feed guide has a slot in the bottom that can hold a funnel for all the feeds to pour and mix into, which will drain into the target glass or cup.

Installation

unzip TikiBot.zip
cd TikiBot
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Running TikiBot

gui.py is the main file to run to launch this application. You will need to run it using Python 3.6 or better.

 cd TikiBot/TikiBot
 python3 gui.py

Configuration

The file TikiBot/resources/tikibot_configs.yaml: Contains all configs for passcode, feeds, recipes, etc. for a standard set of Tiki drinks. On first run, if you edit any configs on the configuration screen, these configs will be written out to the file $HOME/.tikibot.yaml, which will be read in all future runs.

In the lower right corner of the main screen is a gear icon. This is the configuration menu button. If you press it, it will ask for an administrative passcode. The default is '8888'. Once you enter the correct passcode, you will be shown the configuration screen. From here, you can change the passcode (recommended!), add, edit and re-order feeds, add, and edit drink recipes, and shutdown or reboot the system. Any changes made here will be saved to the $HOME/.tikibot.yaml file.

Calibration

Enter the configuration screen as described above.
In the configuration screen, the Manage Feeds button will show you all of the feeds that the software expects, in the order that it expects them.
Take an empty cup and zero a gram scale with it on it. Make sure the scale is set to measure grams.
Select a feed, and you will be presented with a screen that will let you rename it, enable/disable it, start and stop it manually, and calibrate it.
Make sure that the feed line you selected has the expected ingredient attached.
Place the cup under the output of the feed.
Press the Start Feed button to prime the feedline.
When fluid starts pouring into the cup, press the Stop Feed button.
Pressing the calibration button will show you a screen which will let you calibrate the flow rate and pulse overage for that feed.
Start with a Pulse overage of 0.2 and a Duty cycle of 100%. Those are only really needed for advanced calibration. Select an amount of 25 milliliters to dispense. A flow rate of 12.0 is a reasonable starting place.
Empty the cup and re-zero the scale with the empty cup.
Place the cup back under the output of the feed.
Press Pour to dispense into the cup. Wait for it to finish dispensing.
Weigh the cup, to see how many grams of fluid were dispensed.
Take the number of grams measured, divide it by the expected number of milliliters dispensed (25mL, if you followed the above instructions), then multiply that by the current Flow setting. Change the Flow to this new value.

newflow = oldflow * dispensed / expected

Note: You can expect viscous fluids like Sugar Syrup to have very low flow rates like 2.5 mL/s.
Repeat steps 11 to 15 a couple times until the amount dispensed is within about a gram of the expected amount.
Press the back arrow button to get back to the feeds listing screen.
Select the next feed button and go back to step 3. Repeat until all feeds have been calibrated.