Fancy Your Toilet Tweeting Each Flush?

The toilet, or porcelain throne as some of us call it, can be a place of respite and peace, while for others, it is where you release your pent up bowel’s frustrations in one fell swoop. Regardless of how you treat your toilet, it is worth taking note that modifications can be made to “jazz it up”, so to speak, and Thomas Ruecker, an engineer from Finland, came up with the idea of a tweeting toilet after he was retrenched from his job.

Taneli Tikka, Ruecker’s ex-boss, tweeted “Silly sensor IoT question: does anybody know about “smart toilets & sinks” something that measure liquid flow? # of flushes? etc. :) ”

Hence, the birth of the the loToilet which is capable of tracking water usage with every single flush, where it will then tweet it from its Twitter handle @IoToilets. This unique device is able to perform precise measurements, although it will only tweet rounded-off usages. Ruecker will continue to work on improving it so that the tweeting toilet will be a whole lot more precise in nature down the road.

The entire project consumed a weekend’s worth of time, and he required an electric motor, a BeagleBone Black, a handful of household items, an open-source hardware board that runs on Linux, and some coding knowledge to get the engineering challenge done.

Edwin Kee
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Tags: Twitter