Weight coaster

This is the part I hate when it comes to portable projects, How am I going to power them. I could have used AA battery's but I hate waste so It had to be rechargeable. I had recently torn down a pound land power bank and found a nice small lipo charging and boost board inside. I thought I could use this power my project.

The only problem was I would have to have 2 micro usb ports sticking out, One for charging and one for uploading code to the arduino but other then that it worked a treat. This also meant I could have it plugged into a power adaptor without having to worry about over charging the battery

The coaster part of the project had been bugging me all the way through this project but I thought I would figure it out when I got to the end of the project. I needed this part to be strong that's why I used an 3mm think piece of aluminium which was over kill but I wasn't taking any chances. I also decided to use a 2mm thick piece of perspex because it had to be see through. I also needed this part to be water proof because as we all know condensation forms on the outside of a ice cold drink. I was thinking of using bolts and tapping the aluminium on the button to sandwich the WS2812 LED's between the layers.

I had a stroke of genius and decided to use some clear silicon adhesive because this would make it water proof and stick it all together without having to use bolts and taps

Here it is with a heavy weight to make sure its stuck well

A turning point of this project was when I realised I could write to the eeprom. This allowed me to recalibrate the full glass and empty glass and also allowed me to change glasses without the use of a computer.

These are the famous last words, This is what I thought when I first started this project. I got the inspiration from Jeremy S Cook light up coaster. I was planning on using a load cell from bathroom scales but it turned out it was hard to mount them in the way I needed them to be.

I needed to use a HX711 load cell amplifier to feed the arduino