We gathered a lot of data from surveying our classmates throughout the 7th grade. First, we did a preliminary survey and asked the students in our Science class what they thought about shower water wastage. We asked them questions about how long their showers take, and how much time it takes for their shower water to warm up. We then concluded that the most water wastage occurred when people were running the shower water and waiting for the shower to warm up.
We finally started the process of building our shower head attachment. We went through a long process to figure what code would work and we almost figured it out (we still need to put the finishing touches on our code). We met with Sydney Beals who has a lot of experience in coding. She helped us start to code our attachment using the hummingbird program. Next we designed the casing for our attachment. We decided to laser cut an acrylic case that will help keep the electronic parts of our attachment out of the water. We also decided to laser etch our logo into the case.We are at the building stage! It is difficult but we think we are capable based on our meeting on Thursday. As a group we met with Cindy to discuss how we are going to program our thermistors to an Arduino to measure temperature. She also gave us a brief tutorial on how to attach an on and off switch on our prototype. You should look forward to seeing our invention work on a real shower.
We have ordered and received our thermistors. Thermometers sense heat, but when the thermistor reaches a certain temperature it will stop conducting electricity. This will allow us to code the thermistor into our shower head. We have started to test a thermistor that the science department has let us use. We found out that we are going to have the thermistor go off at around 35-45 degrees celsius. This weekend Jonas is going to contact one of his friends that can code and we can learn how to use our thermistor.   Our group has gone through a long process in deciding what problem we should tackle. At first, we were going to work on solar energy. We had other people give us their opinion and what they thought would help our idea. We then went down the road create a more specific idea. We then switched over to water conservation since our solution would not be as effective. Our invention is an attachment to a shower head that after you turn it on alerts you when the water is warmed up. Also, you can set it to a certain time that alerts you when your shower is done. For example, you can set a 4 minute shower and after 4 minutes a timer goes off. There is also a one minute warning that tells you when the timer about to go off so you are prepared and don't have shampoo in your hair. |
AuthorsJoe Poole |
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