Low Cost Water Sensor to Motivate Sustainable Behavior

CHI DIY Workshop Submission 2009

This is an instructible on how to crudely detect water flow in a pipe and drive an ambient display. We are using a cheap mic, some LED's and an arduino. The device is a rough prototype of what we hope to be a persuasive technology that motivates sustainable behavior and raises awareness about water use.

This is a project by Stacey Kuznetsov and Eric Paulos at Carnegie Mellon University Human Computer Interaction Institute.

Produced by
Stacey Kuznetsov
stace@cs.cmu.edu
http://staceyk.org

Eric Paulos
eric@paulos.net
http://paulos.net

Visit http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~daniela/diy/
For more information on CHI DIY 2009

Download the high-res video at
http://staceyk.org/CHIDIY/

Category:

Education

Tags:

• water
• sustainability
• low
• cost
• sensing
• CHI
• DIY
• 2009
• CMU
• HCII
• Human
• Computer
• Interaction
• arduino
• microphone
• amp
• cheap
• sensor
• instructible
• do
• it
• yourself
• carnegie
• mellon
• university
• citizen
• science

[marcellohro]

u`r creative.

[peanuttbutterman]

now how much water did you waste testing this thing? jokes aside it's pretty cool

[rbland]

Wow, a chick that knows her electronics. I approve :P

[doop2010]

Great Idea and nice prototype! I think your costing is a little flawed though - the project doesn't work without the Arduino! Maybe Rev 2.0 using a small 8 pin microcontroller, button cells/solar for power - you could definitely fit it into the same form factor.

[alistairism]

cool

lol

[henk1978]

you can not destroy water.... unless you break apart the actual H2O molecule. the process of cleaning and getting water back into circulation for different use is where systems designers should look for problems. How could one develop better grey water systems, in order to use them in more contexts?

[ometec]

good project good video annoying music

[twilight1138]

Hi, my name is twilight1138 and I'd like to talk to you about saving electricity ...

[bgtheghost]

One question: How does the saved water, presumably in the U.S.A or Europe, get to Bangladesh??

[turadg]

Nice.