Krapatoa

A vigorous laser guided cleansing experience
Laser mounted bidet end-effector
Immersive UX
State-of-the-art UI
System Architecture
Krapatoa
Acquiring the toilet

Inspiration

This project was inspired following a trip to Italy, where one of our team members noticed a significant gap in the Italian bidet market. Their current method is however primitive - users suffer from their inability to properly aim the bidet end-effector onto the target. Krapatoa seeks to resolve this issue, democratizing the bidet by making it more appealing to other world markets. We offer a fully-integrated immersive alternative solution to the traditional environmentally-damaging approach to your calls of nature.

What it does

Krapatoa is fully integrated into a toilet, perfect for retro-fitting traditional toilets. A pressure washer is pumped up to pressurise the system. When the user is ready, they can connect to Krapatoa through a React Native app, which features a live stream of a Pi cam attached to the bidet end-effector. Using their phone's gyroscope, they can guide the bidet onto the desired target (this creates a really immersive experience!), ensuring perfect positioning before firing with laser guidance.

Accessibility was a key priority for the Krapatoa team, so we've also released a Flask app for users who might not have access to a smartphone. For this market segment, the Flask app seamlessly bridges the technology divide by providing an easy-to-use slider bar, which substitutes for the phone's gyroscope.

How we built it

What you really wanted to know We got the toilet from Gumtree for free.

Hardware A servo motor controls the angle of the bidet, which is a butchered pressure sprayer. A small laser module and Pi camera are stuck to this unit and all connected to a Raspberry Pi.

Software The Raspberry Pi runs two servers simultaneously, both Flask apps - one for motor control and one for camera streaming. These communicate to the React native app in a questionable jank way. System Architecture

Challenges we ran into

Cleaning the toilet
We really wanted to electromechanically actuate the valve on the pressure washer, but didn't bring motors with big enough torque or speed to succeed at any of the ideas we had (and we had many).
The extension hose we got was stiff and caused extra nightmares.
We spent the usual obligatory 6 hours trying to connect to a Raspberry Pi unsuccessfully. Then proceeded to repeat this multiple times throughout the hackathon.
Live stream hard
Latency stopped us from being able to mount the guidance system to the users face like a VR headset