SHOWERMASTER

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  The Air Quality Sensor and the Laptop

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Inspiration

Shower Hacks is all about taking a shower. I thought to myself, isn't the shower a prize for everyone else? What if I built something to instead decide who really needs one?

You said you wanted weird....

What it does

SHOWERMASTER(yes, all caps) provides a standalone application that runs locally with an attached air quality sensor. Players use the attached device to place against a spot on their body to calculate how much odor is coming off their body. High scores as added to the public leader board at https://mkly.github.io/showerhacks

How we built it

An SGP-30 air quality sensor is attached to an old touchscreen laptop(via a pi pico) I had in my closet. The laptop runs a Python Arcade app that polls the sensor when the player starts a game. You might be wondering if this will actually measure how much someone smells. Not really, but it does react to particle density which is good enough to make it kind of funny. Like you could just blow on it and it could also react. There is also a public web leader board that pulls from an S3 bucket the application uploads to when a new score is saved.

Challenges we ran into

My old laptop was in an odd spot when I dusted it off and it took a while to get it connected to WiFi. But mostly it was just getting the readings to translate into something reasonably digestible and fun. Like normalizing the readings etc. Some research today showed that I could have controlled a bit for humidity with another sensor.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Just fun to make something a bit more tangible in the tsunami of bespoke SaaS these days.

What we learned

I don't do tons of hardware stuff, so always fun to hack around on that.

What's next for SHOWERMASTER

This is probably it. I might try it on my dog when I get home...

Built With

• python
• python-arcade
• raspberry-pi
• sgp-30