Paul Asselin says:
I wanted to know how much time I was spending under the shower each day, especially in these environmentally conscious times. The benefits of that are that I can perhaps save some money on the water bills and also study the effect of temperature on my showering time.
So Paul designed this Arduino shower timer analyzer. He considered using a water flow meter, but opted instead for using an RFID reader and a Real Time Clock (RTC). He waives his RFID card before the reader upon entering the shower which starts the timer. When he leaves the RFID reader again detects the card and stops the time. The duration is then uploaded to the Thingspeak website’s API section via an ethernet shield.
This was Paul’s entry into the Thingspeak contest.
No need for a water flow sensor, just fix a contact microphone to the water pipe. Sound of running water in pipe should be detectable (or sound of water falling on shower tray or bath). No need for a high-quality mic, so just a piezo transducer should be OK. Of course, he’d still need to know who was using the shower (if it’s shared), so the RFID might be just as good.
It would be nice to auto-detect who’s in the shower without needing to handle an ID card. If you could measure the weight of the person showering, in most cases that would probably distinguish between household members. So, just need to get / make a networked bathroom scale, and step on it briefly before showering. As a plus (or minus?), you can now keep track of your weight, too.
the most interesting thing here imho is that for a potential 50$ prize someone is ready to publish on the Internet, real time, when anyone from his household is in the shower .. I really find this extremely disturbing.
I’m not familiar with ThingSpeak, but is all the data there open for viewing by the public?
According to an April 19 2011 post there, they are “currently working on an index of public channels”. That suggests to me (1) there are non-public channels, and (2) even the public ones are not yet collected into an index.
http://community.thingspeak.com/forum/upcoming-features/public-
channels/#p72