Parts

After early discussion of the overall design of the device, it was decided that we could go ahead and buy the Arduino and the servos that were going to be used in the device. After a preliminary design or the hoppers was created as well as a rough flowchart for the code, we went ahead and ordered the rest of the parts:
Acrylic (.080 and .220)
PVC (1.5")
8 Nuts/Bolts (4.25 x 1/4)
4-40x1/2 Machine screws w/ nuts
IR Sensors
Real Time Clock
LCD Screen ( A second screen was bought when the first stopped working)
Ribbon Cable
Header pins
4x4 Matrix Keypad

Roughing 1

In order to understand what parts were needed and know roughly how the device would work,  we made a systems block diagram showing basic operation of the device.

Background

Today, many individuals rely on many forms of medication in order to cure some complication, or stay healthy. Every year, many people become sick because they do not take their medications on time, get them mixed up, or cannot take care of themselves in a capacity to even take their own medication. On the market today, there are many solutions to this problem. The problem with these solutions is that they are not always cheap, and almost all of them require medication be presorted into containers that are dispensed or opened when the medication needs to be taken.

Our solution is to design and build a device that can hold four medications in hoppers and at programmed times will dispense the correct medication from the correct hoppers using an Arduino Mega and Parallax continuous rotation servos.