fLOW

Increasing awareness of our water usage.

In flow we basically created an IoT flowrate sensor which allows us to see how much water we are using! fLOW consists of three components: the hardware, the server & database, and the frontend. Users can attach the device to their sinks and view their water usage through their computers or phones.

Hardware

The hardware is a flow rate sensor attached to an ESP8266. It attaches directly to the faucet of home sinks and as water flows through the sensor, it accumulates the total volume. Once the water stops flowing, the ESP8266 sends the data (including the volume, timestamp of this entry, and the device ID) to the server to update the database.

Server/Database

Our server is a Node.js server that runs on an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VM. It communicates with a Postgres database. The server handles updating that database from the hardware devices as well as serving the requests from the client frontend.

Frontend

We want to communicate to users in a clear and concise manner how much water they're using. We mainly convey this through graphs and different metrics.

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Improvements

There are many different improvements discussed in the github repositories as well as all the CAD files available for you to use if you wanted to make your own! Feel free to check them out here:

1. fLOW_Hardware [How to make your own! (What I mostly worked on)]
2. fLOW Hardware CAD files [All the CAD files you would need!]
3. fLOW_frontend [The pretty website]
4. fLOW_backend [What I had to post to with the hardware]