Phantazein

An automated faucet that conserves water, makes everyday tasks more efficient and is value for money.

Water is a rudimental necessity for the functioning of each living organism. This universal solvent is the mere reason that implausible life exists on Earth. Not only this but it makes up 71% of the Earth! However, despite this vast abundance, not all of this is consumable. Solely, 3% of freshwater is present, out of which only 1.3% can be consumed and the rest is trapped in glaciers, ice caps, permafrost, etc. 

Further, we use water for everything and every time. Whether it is brushing our teeth, bathing, cooking our food to water needed in the industries to produce goods. Our body itself is made up of 60% of water( according to USGS data) and helps our body function properly.

Water is not only needed for viability but also for the feeling of contentment among humans.

Due to the consumable water being in a meagre quantity we need to use it judiciously but often, people ignore such things. In this chaotic and fast-paced world, small affairs such as closing the tap slip our minds and such minute things have gradually accumulated and resulted in being a major overlooked cause of the scarcity of water. 

These minute gaffes are like the leaking taps of a tank, even though we would’ve filled the tank to the top, the tank will always be half full but never full. Just like that, these problems diminish our progress in solving major obstacles and causes of the wastage of water. 

In this busy world, people are engrossed with work, and therefore small affairs like closing the tap at the right time, brushing teeth with a closed tap, etc often slip our minds. These minute things are often ignored and ultimately lead to wastage of thousands of gallons of water every day!

This is where my project comes in. My project targets these small gaffes and prevents them by using the technology of ultrasonic sensors.

The major objective of the “Smart Faucet” is to halt the prodigal wastage of water. It's a simple tap which is fully automated in terms of filling buckets, tanks, trucks etc and can be controlled by a web application. It eliminates the requirement of any manpower to operate it making it more efficient and ergonomical. 

The Ultrasonic sensor connected to the tap plays as a protagonist and everything depends on the signals given by it. An Ultrasonic sensor will be attached to the tap or faucet and once the electricity is supplied, it will enable the tap to fill the bucket present in the range of the sensor. When the ultrasonic sensor will find the bucket in its range and determine that the bucket is empty then it will send the signals to the relay which will close the circuit with the water pump  which in turn will draw the water into the tap and will let it pass through it. The water pump will halt the flow of water once the bucket is filled. The signals from the Ultrasonic sensor will be sent to the relay by measuring and comparing the distance with the previous scenario and it will open the circuit with the water pump to stop drawing the water and that is how the flow of water will be halted.

• The target customers would be all the common people, farmers, etc, making it a scalable product. It could be used for daily routines for showering, filling buckets and for various other purposes. 

• If analyzed, then most people still prefer taking a bath in showers instead of a bucket and a mug. This is due to the fact that the whole system is automated and all the users have to do is open the tap once in the beginning and close the tap at the end, which requires less manpower than using a bucket and a mug. Taking this into consideration, this device is also fully automated, and the users don’t have to pay heed to whether the bucket is overflowing or is not filled yet, which could increase the usage of buckets and mugs in various houses, workplaces, sports complexes etc. 

I am a senior in high school whose is very passionate about STEM and is going to be pursuing engineering. My subjects in high school included: Math, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Finance and English.

Apart from my subjects, I also have hands on experience and have have worked on various tech projects like follow me cart(a shopping cart which senses a person and follows it),  "Hangman game", "rock, paper, scissors" and "mad-libs",  climasist(a script bot which involved bag of words algorithm and formation of a database to store user experience)which I coded in Python. 

 Further, I developed an application called "Peerbuddy" with the help of the MIT App Inventor, which is a social networking app for special children and participated in Technovation app hackathons.

I have experience in Arduino programming language, 3-D designing(TinkerCAD, Fusion 360), IoT,Python and MySQL. 

The skills that I developed through these activities made me equipped to devise this idea and test it out. 

More experience details can be found on my LinkedIn: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhoomi-thakwani-she-her-8552111b2/

To understand the needs of the target audience better, I conducted various surveys and talked to individuals in order to analyze their perspective and inculcate it in my project. 

Following were the results:

This idea can be considered quite distinctive as not only does it make the daily tasks much more facile but also it solves a common cause, although considered by everyone but very rarely acted upon. Specifically, the usage of ultrasonic sensors and their calculations and comparisons of the distances measured from the bucket makes its working very peculiar as the ordinary sensor taps use IR sensors and don’t really have the mechanism as used here. Neither can its mechanism allow such automatic filling of the buckets hence proving its significance and requirement. Its target audience is also very huge. It will also aid in achieving SDG 11.