Promo Video
Abstract
College is a place of many greats, but what's not great about college are its shared showers. How many times have you made the treacherous trip down to the showers, just to find that all of them are in use? If this has ever happened to you, there’s no need to worry anymore. The IsSomebodyInMeShower is what you have been waiting for. This revolutionary device sends a text message to you indicating whether or not the shower down the hall is in use or not. This is accomplished using a temperature and humidity sensor. Once a certain threshold has been surpassed on our not proprietary sensors, the device will have the reading of the shower being use. The threshold on these sensors being passed is due to the increase in temperature and humidity as a result of water flow. All the user will have do is send our system a text message, and we will respond with a message indicating whether or not somebody is in the shower.
This device will save dorm room stayers countless hours as a result of decreased wandering through the halls trying to find that one open shower!
How it works
The IsSomebodyInMeShower works by using two Arduino microcontrollers, two paired HC-05 Bluetooth modules, and three sensors working in redundancy. These sensors include a HC-SR04 Ultrasonic module, a DHT11 Temperature module, and a DHT11 Humidity Sensor module. These sensors are placed on a hanger that can be easily hung inside any shower via the shower handle.
By using real-world data on the dimensions, humidity, and temperature of showers when in use, we are able to set specific parameters to the sensors to know if there is someone currently using the shower. If one or multiple of the following occur such as the ultrasonic sensor detecting a distance less than the length of the shower or the humidity and temperature sensor detecting a significant rise humidity or temperature, one of the Arduinos that is connected to these sensors will determine that the shower is in use.
Through the HC-05 Bluetooth modules, the first Arduino reading sensor data will communicate to the second Arduino whether the shower is in use or not by turning on an LED when the shower is in use. This will allow the end-user to save the trip down the hall if the shower is being used.
What’s Next
Our current design only scratches the surface of what is possible. In future reiterations, we would first like to create a water-proof enclosure for the sensors that go into the showers. Next, we would also like to eliminate the use of Arduinos all together. This could be achieved by creating a stand-alone app or integrating our data into the Penn Mobile App. This way users can simply check their phone to see if the showers are occupied. In addition, by creating a specific PCB and using a smaller, dedicated microcontroller to connect to the sensors, we could drastically cut down on the cost and the size of the current design.
Challenges We Faced
We had some technical difficulty getting our Arduino to connect to Twilio which would allow us to use SMS messaging as our interface instead. While it turned out the code we were using was outdated, we had to deliver a product, so we decided to use Bluetooth instead. However, in the future we are confident that we can get this to work through SMS messaging.
What We Learned
Through this project, we learned many different skills such as learning how to pair Bluetooth modules to gathering real-world sensor data to delivering a product with a deadline, even if it means making certain sacrifices in design to meet our goals.
Code
https://github.com/ap0999/WhosInMeShower.git
VIDEO LINKS:
https://vimeo.com/302879056 (this is our pre MVP video) https://vimeo.com/305238198 (this is our final product description video)
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.