ToiletChecker | Devpost

Inspiration

The explicit and morbid scenes in public bathroom stalls. The pungent smell of unflushed yellow and brown excretion in toilets. The discomfort from inflation of filled up bladders.

This needs to end.

So, how could we find both a cost effective and efficient way to fix this?

Enter ToiletChecker.

What it does

ToiletChecker is made of hardware that checks if one has flushed the toilet after usage, and if the answer is no, it shames them endlessly. It’s made with components that can be easily attached and installed to a bathroom stall.

How we built it

We have four main hardware components:

button
light sensor
accelerometer
buzzer

Firstly, the button. This is attached to the lock, and it detects whether it's locked. That way, we could tell if someone is about to use the bathroom stall.

Secondly, the light sensor. What this basically does is it detects whether there is a person squatting over the toilet. The light sensor would be about to receive this because the person’s body would block the place that light would touch on the lid. We specifically do this to see whether they are actually using the toilet– they may be just changing in the stall.

The third piece of major hardware we used was an accelerometer to identify movement. It’s attached to the side of the flushing handle. When someone flushes the toilet, the flusher would move, and the accelerometer, which moves with the handle it's attached to, would pick this up.

And finally, the buzzer. This piece of hardware is only relevant to those who don’t flush toilets. If the button of the lock is released without the accelerometer being activated, it means that the toilet is not flushed, and the buzzer will start buzzing.

We used the Arduino software to program the logic of our components.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time using hardware in a hackathon, and so we had to consult a lot of mentors on what to do. And when we say a lot, we mean a lot. Literally every half hour we would be looking for a mentor. We were tiny kids asking for help, begging and laughing, but we’re glad that at least more than half of them liked our idea? They’d laugh, hopefully in a positive way. Shoutout to that one person that said it was safe to cut our board apart, and got pliers to do it for us! To this day, we are thankful. Your image will forever rest in our hearts. <3

Another major challenge was trying to get our entire team on the same page. We all had different strengths and weaknesses, and especially had different outlooks on the project… we had to be especially careful and aware when communicating, since it was also the first time some of us had worked together on a hackathon. The hardest part of the entire project was probably the very start, when we were trying to think of a project idea. Half our group had doubts about our idea (respectable), while the other half would kill to make it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of our hardware hack and managing to get it to work. Most of our team had never touched Arduino before, and none of us have extensive experience in hardware at all. So we are very proud of ourselves in this sense. We are also happy with our beautiful cardboard toilet that we used to demonstrate our hardware.

What we learned

From this hackathon we gained a lot of knowledge on hardware. Moreover, due to the comfortable in-person atmosphere that Jamhacks 6 created, we learned to properly reach out to others and communicate with mentors and supervisors, which was very supportive to our project.

What's next for ToiletChecker

We want to see a future with cleaner washrooms, and more people that have the initiative to flush toilets. Due to this, we hope to implement a refined version of our project in some school washrooms to help create our vision.