Friday, 13 March 2015

Group 1--Vending machine controller design--The bench inspection day (Mar. 13st. 2015)

Today was the final bench inspection day to show our project by the presentation with the poster and demonstration on the DE2 board.

Firstly, the poster designed of this project could be shown below:
Figure 1. The poster designed for this project


During the whole bench inspection day, we mainly gave a poster presentation and the demonstration on DE2 board to our supervisor and the assessor. Generally speaking, the whole process was successful and our work on this project was also satisfied. However, according to the question asked by the assessor and the supervisor, we found some drawbacks of the design which meant we could make some improvements for the further development. They are listed below:

  1. Firstly, the number of the product was considered as infinity in this program, in other words, we did not consider the number of products and process them which did not conform with the reality. To improve this, we could further add DFFs as the counter to process the number of products.
  2. Secondly, refer to the operation flow charts, this controller was designed to firstly choose only one item and then pay for this item which was not in agreement with the real situation. So in the future, the design can be modified to allow customers to incert money firstly and then choose the items they want to purchase which can be more than one. To realize this, we will need to calculate the total amount of money received firstly and then to process the change condition based on the price of products selected and the total amount of money.
Finally, after the bench inspection was finished, we also took photos together with our work, and we also want to give our appreciation to our supervisor and all the staffs in the department for providing the help and we really enjoyed those weeks working with this project. The photo of our group is shown below:
Figure 2. The photo of the group

Wednesday, 11 March 2015

Group 1--Vending machine controller design--The demontration vedio of the project (Mar. 11st. 2015)

Since the whole controller design, simulations and testings were completed   successfully, our group created a vedio of the demonstration of our design on the ALTERA DE2 board this week before the final bench inspection. To see the vedio, you can just click on the following 'start' button or simply go to the following URL: http://youtu.be/3YhpSKWHxIQ

The demonstration vedio of the project