Aqua-v2.0

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Inspiration

Water, the core element of survival for living beings on the planet and only 2% of the total water available is fit for drinking. Pure drinking water is scarce and expensive in some parts of the world. Plastics, the root cause of Global Warming is the main reason for drastic weather changes across the world ranging from solar flares to untimely sea tides. On an average, 275 million ton of plastics is dumped into seas every year out of which a majority of them are drinking water bottles.

In the United States, the Cost for 1L of water is $1.44 which is really high compared to other countries, thus through Aqua-v2.0 we plan to distribute pure drinkable water to the citizens in a new manner while following the contactless way to get it.

Many people across the world do not have access to safely managed drinking water and it is mostly due to the lack of resources. Thus to overcome this, we built Aqua.

Also to add to all these, our project is completely dependent on Solar Energy to power the Pump and in the future, we plan to use Solar energy for powering the Raspberry Pi Zero.

What it does

Aqua-v2.0, a smarter and a better way to water is an end to end solution which helps a person to get water from nearby Drinking Water Kiosks through IoT based dispensing and helps a user track the amount of water consumed as well as the Number of Bottles he/she has Saved.

A user can generate a QR-Code when he/she signs-up and then uses that in his/her water bottle. When scanned using the Aqua app, the response will be sent to a Raspberry-Pi controlled module, which is responsible for dispensing the right amount of water to a bottle. The person can pay towards the water bottle using the in-app payment gateway and 50% of the payment goes towards Charities working towards Saving Water, Reducing Plastic and more.

How we built it

After we got the idea, we made a list of the components, tools which we need and then procured the hardware parts.
Then we designed the app using Adobe Xd, Adobe Photoshop. Once the initial designs were done, we set-up the project using Facebook's React Native mobile framework. At first, the initial set of screens were done and then Firebase was setup for the backend part.
While we were developing the app, we also focused upon the hardware section, linking Raspberry-Pi to a submersible pump and then initializing it with a python script and once it was done, we linked the script with our Firestore Database and set it up to work dynamically in real time. We also integrated payment gateway to the app to support for purchase of credits towards buying water through the app.
We also built another application using React-Native for the dispenser part to support for scanning of the QR-Cards shown by the user. The App only scans QR-Codes supported through our application and if any other QR Code is used, it gives a Invalid Message through Audio Feedback to the user

Challenges we ran into

The most difficult part was the linking of Raspberry-Pi with Firebase to get the real time updates through snapshots and from these updates, run the submersible pump.
Integration of payment gateway using Firebase functions.
We designed the whole enclosure using waste parts i.e. Paint Boxes and used Cardboard for the aesthetics part.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had set some milestones for ourselves during the whole process, one thing we are definitely proud and happy is that we successfully linked the Pi Board to Pump and we were able to get it to function according to our needs :)
The integration of payment gateway with our app with proper security and working of it.
We used less power and relied mostly on using Renewable Source of Energy i.e. Solar Energy

What we learned

Some aspects of the projects were new to us and we had an amazing time building it. We learnt to link the Raspberry-Pi board with the firebase document to fetch the real time data from it and coordinate the data with the submersible pump.
We learnt to integrate one of the largest payment gateways in the world, Stripe into our app to support for in-app purchase credits to be used to get water.