Developing a GUI for CookMate

CookMate hopes to support several recipes. However, to allow this, CookMate has to grant the user flexibility to choose between different modes of cooking. Therefore, there was a need to have a GUI that allows users to pick between a couple of different recipes.

Designing the UI

The prototype UI currently consists of 2 screens. The first screen offers a list of recipes that CookMate supports. The second screen reveals details about the status of the selected recipe in progress.

Hardware

To allow the execution of the GUI, a 3.5-inch touch screen was selected. The graphics and backend functionality are powered by a raspberry pi 3B+. This pi also communicates with the STM32 microcontroller that in turn controls the rest of the sub-systems.

Designing the backend application

Behind the scenes, the GUI application reads a stored .txt file based on what recipe is selected. This .txt consists of a list of instructions that are converted to specific bytes and then transmitted to the STM32 via a UART bus. This process is initiated on a new thread once the "Start" button is pressed on the screen.