Smart Ball Milling Machine

The ball milling machine is a simplistic device that grinds substances into a fine powder by vigorously shaking its contents over an extended amount of time, similar to a paint mixer. Deep in the basement of the University of Central Florida’s Mathematical Sciences Building, the Blair Research Group - led by Dr. Blair - proposed upgrading their current ball milling machine to be more effective towards their research efforts. Previously, the machinery was only capable of its basic and fundamental purpose - grinding substances down. Though the ball milling machine still accomplishes this endeavor, to better assist Dr. Blair and quantify the expenditures - both the cost and maintenance - of his research, our Senior Design group carried out Dr. Blair's project to improve the ball milling machine and provide it with substantial upgrades. The nature of these improvements was to measure and detect multiple key parameters and to provide a significant increase to user quality of life.

Videos

Documents

Divide and Conquer
Sixty Page Update
Senior Design 1 Report
Critical Design Review Slides
Conference Paper
Final Presentation Slides
Senior Design 2 Report

Group Members

Review Committee

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our sponsor, Dr. Blair, for his generous support for this project in time, technical expertise, and funding. We additionally extend our thanks to Dr. Weeks for his constant presence in the senior design lab and his help with debugging our hardware, Mlinda Heng for lending a very steady hand in assembling our surface mount components on two revisions of three different PCBs, Dr. Abichar for his embedded systems advice and his time as a reviewer, and Dr. Mike for agreeing to review our project despite his busy schedule. Finally, we would like to thank our coordinator, Dr. Chan, for his clear feedback on submissions throughout senior design.