Inspiration
The inspiration for our hack is our own day-to-day life struggles. As college students, we often get so caught up in our busy everyday life that we forget to do the simple thing, which is drink water. This often causes dehydration, headaches, thirst, dry skin, and mood changes. Combining our different expertise, we decided to tackle this problem by creating a water bottle that encourages the user to drink a healthy amount of water daily to lead a healthier lifestyle.
What it does
Using Tinkercad, we created an Arduino project that allowed the user to feed their digital pet by drinking water at a set time. The amount of water drank is detected by a pressure sensor at the bottom of the bottle that is connected to the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), LEDs, and a timer in order to display and reset the health of the pet. This is a way of positively encouraging users to drink more water as well as giving them a little bit of serotonin boost when seeing their pet happy and well-fed.
How we built it
We used Arduino as our main way of building it. We worked on this on Tinkercad to represent our idea as an observable model that works. We were able to build and connect all of our components through the different resources found in tinkercad’s, circuits section. By spending hours doing research on the best most creative way to code, design, and connect all of our components we found new ways to solve our problems and build a prototype. The LCD screen will start timing once the user starts the program, and it will display how long the program ran. The left three LED lights correspond to the health of the pet. The green light represents full health, and the red light represents low health. If the user does not drink enough amount of water for a period of time, the pet's health will decrease. The right three LED lights are the alert system of the water bottle. It reminds the user to drink water if they do not for a period of time. The user can turn off the switch to reset the timer and pet life for each day. The sensor is a pressure sensor that detects how much water is in the bottle and will trigger the alert if the user is not drinking enough water
Challenges we ran into
Syncing the pressure sensor, LCD, timer, and LEDs with each other. Fixing bugs and mistakes in our codes.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of our ideas and how we are able to create a digital prototype to bring it to life. After running numerous trials, our main back-end developer was able to get our LCD code to work. Our main designer was also able to bring our idea to life after hours of designing. Although we aren’t experienced in coding we were able to learn something new with this experience and create. We are proud that we were able to use our innovative thinking, knowledge of coding, and skills to create a project that can help others in their daily life.
What we learned
We learned how to implement each of our skills into this complex. Through extensive communication with each other, we were able to delegate tasks to each member to make sure that we are in our element to succeed. In addition, we learn that we can always ask questions in order to accomplish our goal and we don’t have to struggle alone.
What's next for Hydro Pet
For future improvements, we plan to have it to have a variety of pets that can be changed in our application. As well as use IOS/ Androids apps to help set a schedule from the time we wake up to when we sleep. Another improvement for the future is to improve the health bar to be more specific. Instead of only having green, yellow, and red to represent the urgency we will implement a more diverse health bar of 12 LED lights for the estimated 12 hours of our daily life. Lastly, we would like to add a better way to charge the entire circuitry for years. This would be through a solar cell that we could attach around the bottle.
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