Soap Alarm

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  With full case on

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  Birds-eye view of soap window

Inspiration

We wanted to create a useless, yet humorous invention that poked fun at the stereotypes engineers face.

What it does

The Soap Alarm ensures you wash your hands for an appropriate amount of time. The Soap Alarm is a soap tray that begins a countdown whenever a user removes the soap from the tray. The countdown ensures you wash yours thoroughly and effectively! If the bar of soap is put back on the tray before the countdown is over, an alarm will play reminding you to wash your hands.

How we built it

We used a Qualcomm provided Arduino Due and Grove dev kit consisting primarily of a Grove base shield and Arduino Due. We used Arduino IDE in conjunction with grove sensors and a sparkfun SD card reader to produce the audio tunes. The countdown is displayed on an exterior LCD display and is displayed clearly to the user. Additionally, we used a piezo speaker to play tones when the soap is replaced too early.

Challenges we ran into

We faced major issues in the implementation of the LCD display. The base shield was built for an Arduino Uno. When used with a Due, all I2C ports were made unusable, and required manual wiring with jumper cables. This posed a significant challenge during the implementation stage for the LCD.

We also encountered significant difficulty with the SD card sensor. There was conflict in documentation regarding with SPI to use, and how to write code that works with it. Eventually, through hours of combing through repos and documentation we were able to develop a solution that could read and write to and from the microSD card reader.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were super proud of working through the night and producing a final product we were proud of. There were many occasions through the weekend where we cheered and celebrated at overcoming a challenge we'd been troubleshooting for hours. We had lots of fun and don't regret a single second!

What we learned

We greatly improved our abilities working with Arduinos and Arduino IDE. None of us had prior experience working with Arduino Dues, and we were able to learn about the differences and advantages of using a Due vs an Uno. We also learned about sdFat library, and how storage is used and accessed by Arduino. We also learned about some of the solutions Grove was able to use to provide an easy to use hub for Uno (unfortunately not so much for due....).

What's next for Soap Alarm

Developing a new waterproof housing that is able to protect internal components and shield them from any potential splashes or spills created during the handwashing process. Also further expanding upon the SD card integration and using a speaker + amp to play different tones that the piezo cannot produce. and Trebuchet or Catapult... Stay tuned....

Built With

• arduino
• c++
• github