Our Idea
After the toilet observation last week, Themis and I decided to work with the toilet flusher. According to the inconsistent flush of the automatic flusher, what if the flushing system turn into a gamble game. You might have to lose some precious time just because you lost in the gamble. Our toilet flusher is triggered by two sensors, the IR beam breaker and the PIR sensor. In case you need to flush, you have to swap your hand to the sensor and get the flushing method. You might lucky and the toilet flushes automatically otherwise you have to dance till it flushes!
The Idea starts with the question that "what if you have to dance to flush the toilet ?" and Themis come up with the idea of gambling after went to the resident talk at ITP.
About the sensor
There are two parts of this sensor which are the receiver and the sender. When we block the light between the sender and the receiver, the sensor will be detected. We decided to use this sensor as a switch to trigger the random function for the flush
The infrared sensor that detects the motion by receiving the infrared radiation from the living body. We use the PIR sensor to detect the movement of the users while they dance because the PIR can detect how much the movement is happening.
After my research about this sensor, I found that we can adjust the knobs on the back of the sensor to change the sensitivity of the sensor to detect more distance and time.
Technical Part
Circuit diagram
Coding part
To demonstrate our idea, we use the P5 sketch to represent the flush. Mostly I work on the part of the PIR sensor and combining the code.
First We used the state of the IR Beam breaker to trigger the random function in p5. If the result shows as automatic flush, the water in the sketch will be decreased automatically otherwise the result will be the dancing mode and the user have to dance till the water is empty.
we used the value of the PIR sensor to trigger the flushing in the dance mode. When I test the sensor, I found that the normal value of the sensor is in the range between 400 to 500. According to that, I set the threshold below and above the minimum and maximum value of the usual reading to detect the movement.
Prototyping
Big thanks to Themis for handling all the fabrication parts for our prototype. Working with her was such a pleasure to me. I really enjoy and appreciate our collaboration! (Check out Themis's blog for more information)
Testing with LED
Testing with the sketch