Inspiration
Currently, there is a large drought in California, and many places in the world. In these areas, it is imperative to save water, but consumers only see their water usage every two months when they get their water bill. drip is designed to close this feedback loop by allowing users to see their water usage after every shower.
What it does
drip is a smart water meter that monitors water flow through your shower, and beams the data to your smartphone. From our easy to use app, users can see their current water usage, their history, compete with friends for lower water usage, and earn achievements by saving water. This is all achieved while never requiring a user to charge it or change a battery, because it generates its own power from the water flowing through it. After the 1 minute installation, drip never needs to be touched again.
How we built it
drip's housing was created by a 3D printer designed on 123D Design. This houses circuity we built over the past two days which computes shower length and sends the data to our AWS server. We also created an iOS app in Swift which pulls user data and displays it in a lovely fashion.
Challenges we ran into
Hardware always presents unique challenges when working at a hackathon. Because we did not start ahead of time, we ran into many issues of needing more hardware than we expected. For instance, we needed an op amp to invert a voltage, an external battery to power the op amp, and many more problems. In addition, the 3D printer stopped working right before we started printing, so we had to issue commands to it in assembly code instead of using its cloud interface.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Every team member is proud of the work we did this weekend. In under 30 hours, we designed and implemented a complete product, including building the casing, creating the circuitry, designing a website, setting up the back-end server, and implementing an iOS app. There is nothing more we wish we could have done, and we are proud to call drip ours.
What we learned
This weekend has taught us all an incredible amount. We learned an incredible amount about electrical engineering. We also learned a lot about the tools we used (such as 123D design).
What's next for 127#drip
Next, we plan to refine drip and wish to pursue taking drip to market (at least in a small quantity).
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