Few issues in life are extra irritating than a malfunctioning rest room. You have skilled this anytime you have entered a buddy’s toilet and acquired the recommendation to “simply jiggle the deal with.” From a mechanical perspective, bogs are literally fairly easy. However they’ll falter if the fill valve or flush valve begin to stick. If the fill valve sticks, you find yourself with an empty tank and the bathroom cannot flush. If the flush valve sticks, water retains flowing endlessly. To inform residents when that happens, Jacob Preston designed this ToiletMonitor.
The ToiletMonitor has one job: to sound an alarm if the bathroom reservoir doesn’t refill after a flush. It could actually’t truly do something about that drawback by itself, however the alarm will hopefully get the eye of bathroom-goers whereas they’re nonetheless washing their fingers to allow them to come again over to provide the deal with a jiggle.
This requires surprisingly little {hardware}. The first part is a SparkFun SAMD21 Mini Breakout board, which is a small improvement board that takes benefit of the implausible ATSAMD21G18 microcontroller. It’s a bit overkill for this venture, however continues to be inexpensive. Three different parts connect with that board: a button, a piezo buzzer, and a USB breakout. The microcontroller drives the piezo buzzer by an NPN transistor with energy coming from the USB breakout. The button turns off the alarm.
The ToiletMonitor is ready to detect the water within the tank by a pair of wires. Once they’re immersed in water, some present can move between them. Once they’re out of the water, the resistance of the air stops all present move. The person simply has to place the wires so that they’re immersed when the tank is full, however not instantly after a flush.
The remainder is just a few intelligent programming. The ToiletMonitor begins a timer when it first detects an absence of immersion, indicating {that a} flush simply occurred. If it does not detect immersion once more inside an affordable period of time, it is aware of that there’s a drawback and it sounds the alarm.
That is most likely extra work than merely fixing the bathroom. However it retains the Preston’s rest room from operating constantly and overfilling their septic tank, so it solves an actual drawback.