Few issues in life are extra irritating than a malfunctioning rest room. You have skilled this anytime you’ve got entered a good friend’s lavatory and obtained the recommendation to “simply jiggle the deal with.” From a mechanical standpoint, bathrooms are literally fairly easy. However they’ll falter if the fill valve or flush valve begin to stick. If the fill valve sticks, you find yourself with an empty tank and the bathroom cannot flush. If the flush valve sticks, water retains flowing endlessly. To inform residents when that happens, Jacob Preston designed this ToiletMonitor.

The ToiletMonitor has one job: to sound an alarm if the bathroom reservoir doesn’t refill after a flush. It will possibly’t truly do something about that drawback by itself, however the alarm will hopefully get the eye of bathroom-goers whereas they’re nonetheless washing their fingers to allow them to come again over to offer the deal with a jiggle.

This requires surprisingly little {hardware}. The first element is a SparkFun SAMD21 Mini Breakout board, which is a small improvement board that takes benefit of the improbable ATSAMD21G18 microcontroller. It’s a bit overkill for this challenge, however continues to be inexpensive. Three different parts connect with that board: a button, a piezo buzzer, and a USB breakout. The microcontroller drives the piezo buzzer by an NPN transistor with energy coming from the USB breakout. The button turns off the alarm.

The ToiletMonitor is ready to detect the water within the tank by a pair of wires. Once they’re immersed in water, some present can movement between them. Once they’re out of the water, the resistance of the air stops all present movement. The person simply has to place the wires so that they’re immersed when the tank is full, however not instantly after a flush.