Cabinet-Mounted Water Dispenser Keeps You Hydrated
H2-Glow! This water filtration system fills a glass automatically when placed under the tap, while lighting up blue.
We all need water to live, and most of us could probably stand to drink a few more glasses each day. You might get your H2O from the tap, or from a dispenser on the fridge, but hacker “StorageB” merely has to raise his glass up near a cabinet on top of the sink to have it dispense this refreshing liquid.
The system is outlined in this Reddit video post, and utilizes a filtration system with piping to route the output water to the proper dispensing position. Along with the tubing is mounted an infrared sensor to detect a nearby glass, a solenoid valve, and an ESP8266 NodeMCU board. Glass presence triggers dispensing, and as a bonus a NeoPixel stick fades in and out to in blue to set they hydration mood, with the help of a 3.3 to 5V level shifter.
While some may say this is overkill, what could be more important than proper hydration? Future goals for the project include actually tracking how much water StorageB drinks, as well as alerting him when it’s time to change the filter.
According to the GitHub description, “MQTT messaging is currently built into the code and working, but work still needs to be done one the server side to log the data and display usage metrics on a web page.” There’s also some mention of creating animations with the NeoPixels beyond fading, so perhaps this could be turned into a more interactive element as well.
