If you have any questions, please drop me email and I’ll update this post.
Assignment 3: Visual display of a state that does not have a visual state
Due: 11:59pm, Monday, 9 September, 2019
What to turn in: For now, combine your sketch files and fritzing file in to a zip file and attach that to the post describing your response.
Define a simple state machine in hardware and software representing a real system, use visual information to describe the states. We are looking for the simplest display to provide a person with what they need to know about the state of a system.
Accessibility is a good place to start looking for a problem. There are some accessibility issues that effect everyone, say a lack of information about an ongoing task being done by a machine. My clothes drier has lights to tell me what it’s doing, but I have no idea how long it will be until my clothes are dry.
Example solution:
A dishwasher has three cycles: wash, rinse, and dry. A state machine for this would have a mechanical switch that starts the state machine, timers that lead it through each state, and some visual indicator of the current state. One solution would be LEDs representing states and a digital display showing how much time is remaining before the dishes are dry. Would you need three LEDs for wash, rinse and dry; or would two LEDs for “washing” and “drying” be enough? If I know it’s in “drying” mode and in a hurry I could open it up, remove an item, then dry it by hand.