Water is a precious resource. Millions of people do not have access to clean drinking water, and as many as 4000 children die from water contaminated illnesses every day. Yet, we continue to be wasteful with our resources. The overarching goal of this project is to motivate more sustainable water use behavior and raise awareness about global water issues.
This is an instructible on how to crudely detect water flow in a pipe and drive an ambient display. I am using a piezo transducer, some LED's and an arduino. The device is a rough prototype of what will eventually become a persuasive technology that motivates sustainable behavior and raises awareness about water use.
This is a project by Stacey Kuznetsov and Eric Paulos at the Living Environments Lab, at Carnegie Mellon University Human Computer Interaction Institute.
Living Environments Labhttp://www.living-environments.net
The video below illustrates a previous version of this project, where a microphone is used instead of a piezo element to detect water flow. You will achieve better performance when using a piezo transducer, so this instructible details the piezo approach.
Special thanks to Briam Lim, Bryan Pendleton, Chris Harrison and Stuart Anderson for help with ideas and design of this project!