If you’re taking any medication, you probably need to take it in a certain dose on a certain schedule. It can quickly become difficult to keep track of when you’re taking multiple medications. To that end, [Mellow_Labs] built an automated pill dispenser to deliver the right pills on time, every time.
The pill dispenser is constructed out of 3D printed components. As shown, it has two main bins for handling two types of pills, controlled with N20 gear motors. The bins spin until a pill drops through a slot into the bottom of the unit, with the drop detected by a piezo sensor. It uses a Beetle ESP32 as the brains of the operation, which is hooked up with a DS1307 real-time clock to ensure it’s dosing out pills at the right time. It’s also wired up with a DRV8833 motor driver to allow it to run the gear motors. The DRV8833 can run up to four motors in unidirectional operation, so you can easily expand the pill dispenser up to four bins if so desired.
We particularly like how the pill dispenser is actually controlled — [Mellow_Labs] used the ESP32 to host a simple web interface which is used for setting the schedule on which each type of pill should be dispensed.
We’ve featured some other pill dispenser builds before, too.
Thanks to [Prankhouz] for the tip!
All it’s missing is “\<beep> \<beep> WEŹ PIGUŁKĘ \<beep> \<beep>” sound
See 26:17 for an example https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8qeff5
(Would love to link YouTube, but for them important pieces of culture are deemed “inappropriate” and locked behind age restriction.)
Also, while it doesn’t matter much for dietary supplements, I wouldn’t put actual prescription medicine there. It’s probably stored in hermetic blisters for a reason. Unpacked and stored for days in this thing, moisture, air ingress may impact its effectiveness.
But, but, but… what about the microplastics you’ll ingest from this?!?
This is my day job.
As mentioned above, light and moisture will ruin drugs fairly quickly, possibly merging them all into a single clump or turning them to powder. Our machines have a small dehumidifier inside.
Pills are all sorts of sizes, the slot may only drop 1 large pill but several small pills. There’s no real way around some amount of customization tied to the pill size.
A piezoelectric sensor may not detect small pills and pill dust will eventually kill it. We use fairly simplistic optical sensors.