Where's My Water?

Inspiration

Much to our chagrin, the current industry leading water fountain model; the Elkay EZWSR Bottle Filling Station is lacking in effective features and displays an inconsequential "bottles saved" counter that contributes little to no good towards the fountain's practical use. Additionally, the fountain incapable of distinguishing different objects placed in front of the sensor—whether it be a water bottle or an alligator—it will indiscriminately dispense water. Another flaw we wanted to tackle was that the fountain continues to dispense water as long as there is an object in front of the sensor, even if the bottle is overflowing. This humiliation has incited a passion within us to create a more technologically impressive and environmentally-friendly solution to the Elkay EZWSR Bottle Filling Station.

What it does

Where's My Water dispenses water into a variety of water bottles and common containers that hold liquids—such as cups and mugs, and automatically stops when the container is reasonably filled.

How we built it

We trained an AI model MobileNetV2 SSD to identify and dimension water bottles and other containers, then loaded it onto a HDK8450 Development Kit with a camera card. We created an Android application intended to use the AI image recognition and relay necessary information to a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with an attached Ultrasonic sensor to determine the water level and dimensions of a water bottle from empty to full.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge that we faced was writing an application from scratch that could receive the output generated by the camera card to extract the necessary information to transmit to our Raspberry Pi. The main difficulty in our design was securing smooth communication between each component to transmit information for efficient processing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our idea innovatively uses technology such as a Qualcomm HDK8450 and a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B to contribute to user accessibility and sustainable living.