What is the PreSpice?

Modern trends in American lifestyles have led to a decrease in home cooking, costing Americans thousands according to USA TODAY. While many justify this spending in exchange for time saved, we interviewed over 100 potential customers and found that it was not only the time and mess that discouraged individuals from cooking, but simply the unawareness of what spices they had and how to use them.

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Our senior design team decided to address these customer needs by creating the PreSpice. The PreSpice is not only an automated spice dispenser that reduces the mess and guesswork associated with cooking, but also a cooking companion. By keeping track of the user’s dried spices and offering recipe inspiration based on user input, the PreSpice introduces the user to new and exciting flavor combinations. These design goals were addressed by our team through integrating hardware and software: making this project just as much a programming challenge as it was an engineering design challenge.

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The device is capable of storing ten different spices (the number we found to be regularly used by a home chef), and dispense them precisely without cross-contamination. Additionally, it was critical to our design that the user be able to refill containers when they become low and swap out spices as they see fit. Sensors were utilized to accurately control the hardware, including the implementation of hall effect sensors and photo transistors.

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Extensive software was created to generate a user-friendly interface. This is displayed on a touch screen that has been integrated into the front of the PreSpice. Here, the user can select pre-programmed recipes or dispense spices individually. The amount of each spice can be adjusted by the user and saved as their custom version of the recipe. Once spices are loaded into the PreSpice, an on-board microcontroller cross-references the spices with recipes stored in the database to determine what can be made by the user.