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?!?
Please go away and never come back.
Curious response. You OK there?
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.
i did not watch the clickbait but i figure these are all of them the sort of thing that will be revealed pretty quickly in use. some of them, i suspect, wouldn’t be so bad depending on your particular needs. but you won’t know until you use it for a few months. i’d rather see the project that’s been in use for 3 years than the project that’s been in development for 3 years.
for example, i made a bed, and it was no good, and then i made another and it was alright but it was suffering damage from my weight, and then i made a third and it was great but it was sagging over weeks and i made a fourth and i’ve slept on it for two nights and i’m finally feeling pretty optimistic about it. if i was a hackaday contributor, i’d probably have published the first one instead of building the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th ones. i can’t see any way around this contradiction — how do we get the debugged projects onto hackaday when we are too busy debugging to publish? i suppose the problem is me
This reminds me of a device that was produced for a time – instead of trying to dispense individual pills, they tracked when the bottle was accessed and lit a ring around the bottle to remind patients when to take the medication/which medication to take. The variation on pill size, shape, etc, is huge for medications (prescription and not). Add in the issue as you mentioned of moisture, and it becomes hard pretty fast to accurately dispense meds not in blister packs.
An idea floated a while back was producing small “packs” or individual bags with the timed medications (AM dose, PM dose), and then reminding the patient to take X packet, making it easier to feed out a pack on a timed interval. I don’t know if it moved further along or not.
Strip packs packs have been around for ~50 years in Asia. I wish they’d hurry up and break the dominance of amber vials here. Slowly, but surely… I’m installing a new machine today.
Well shoot I was not aware of that, that looks like it could be helpful in more than a few situations.
I repack my prescriptions at work. 3 packs is less plastic than a small vial and can fit several pills per pack. We’re working on a biodegradable packing film, but unfortunately something that breaks down easy isn’t great at keeping out moisture.
What about holidays?
Yes, a serious limitation. It only works for holidays that are on days ending in ‘y’.
Also too much rainbow for me in this video.
Rainbows beautify our world. There’s no such thing as “too much rainbow”.