Cooler Delivery
Introduction: Cooler Delivery
Hey you, yes you. Are you tired of not knowing when your groceries are delivered? Let’s say you don’t want to go to two stores. So, you order online to get it delivered and go out to Target and come back to find all of your groceries are on your door. All of the ice cream is all over the steps and the meat is spoiled and warm. Wow! What a mess but, my friend this is where we come in. The thing you’re about to know how to build will solve all of your problems, in a cheap, easy way. Using a standard cooler, you can keep your delivery cool, alert your phone anywhere, AND provide a mechanism that allows for a no contact situation. Ready? Let’s get started.
( idea produced and published with my dad's permission by <PERSON>, Age 10 )
Supplies
* Any standard cooler
* String/rope (about 16-18 inches)
* Duct tape
* Double sided tape
* Frozen cooler packs (or ice)
* Portable USB power stick
* Raspberry Pi (a 3 is used in this, but it will probably work on any version aside from 1 due to the pinout being different)
* Door Sensor Contact
* Optional - computer case front panel wires to splice to the door sensors and the headers on the Pi
* Optional - electrical tape if you use the computer case front panel wires
Step 1: Cooler Handle
So, the first thing gets about 12-16 inches of rope and open the cooler.
Look on the other side of the top underneath the lid. This is where you will be looking at for this step. Grab three pieces of duct tape and make sure to lay them of top of your rope in a pattern like in the picture to make it strong.
After you’re done with that make sure you can lift with that rope outside and be able to open and close the cooler freely. If you have a squeaking noise on your cooler that use a spray called WD40. This will make that sound go away like magic. 98
Cool thing is you can use this for your doors too!
This mechanism allows the delivery person to just pull the string to open the lid, but when you need to open the cooler, you can use the handle like normal! This is great to not spread COVID!!!
When you're done you’re ready to move on!
Step 2: Additional Protections (Optional)
If you feel like there still might be too much contact, then you can do this option!
The next step is to get a box of disposable gloves, you can lay these on a table or on the cooler and tell people to use these when opening and pulling the string on the cooler. Make sure to get a wastepaper basket out there too! The other thing you can do is make a washable cloth covering.
To do this you need some cloth and some rubber bands. Cut the cloth so it is as thin as the rope, then use two rubber bands to secure the top and bottom of the cloth to your rope. So, one more time wrap the cloth around the rope and make sure it is tight, the use two rubber bands to secure it at the top and bottom. How this works is they use the rope to open and close the cooler, and put your groceries in. After they are done, they dispose of their gloves in the wastepaper basket. Congratulations! Whatever way you did this is fine, and your done with this part of your cooler project. Give you self a pat on the back. Nice job! Keep up the good work!
Step 3: Set Up the Pi
You made it this far, that's AWESOME!
Here's the technology part - you'll need to first wire up your Raspberry Pi. Go ahead and load a default Pi image, but make sure you have Python 3. There are a number of guides to this, and we can't show them all here.
Next, you will need to connect the door sensors to pins 18 and 20 to your Raspberry Pi. You can do this either directly or if you have some old cables from a computer case (the front panel), you can splice the cables to this so you have a nice connector to the pins on the Pi. The sides don't matter (ground/gpio aka 20/18), so just make sure you have solid connections.
Next either print out a Raspberry Pi case, or use one that you can 3D print - this is what my dad did (
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1572173)
In the end, it should look like the picture above.
Next on to programming the Pi. 259