Ought'r Wireless Shower Monitor

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  Water + electronics != releasing the blue smoke, amazingly!!!

Inspiration

The California water crisis. Also, my gas bill is too high.

What it does

Tracks water consumed and water temperature, and then estimates the energy usage.

How I built it

Uses NRF24 to transmit data from a Hall effect water sensor and thyristor temperature monitor to a base station.

Challenges I ran into

Everything. Principally, programming AVR chips. Constantly running into synrchronization issues, bad protocols, communication issues up the wazoo.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Able to get water usage data and temperature transmitted. LED control is running but needs tweaking. Worked nearly the full 24 hours straight. Also wrote some arduino code that I think some of the best stuff I've written, despite the time crunch.

What I learned

Soldering proto boards to load ATMEL chips into and ISP programming just isn't worth the extra time and energy compared to solderless breadboards. Got really good at debugging microcontroller communication protocol bugs.

Doing a hackathon solo is really, really tough. I tried reaching out the day of the hack to see if anyone was interested in joining my team for the project, but it seemed most people already had teams. Coming into a hackathon with a team is the way to go. I did try to rope my compsci classmates into the hackathon, but they all wimped out.

What's next for Ought'r Wireless Shower Monitor

More prototyping.

Built With

• arduino
• python