Low Cost Water Flow Sensor and Ambient Display

Step 8 Future Suggestions

You may choose to drive the Arduino off a battery. An upcoming tutorial will show you how to run this display by drawing power directly from the running water itself, or by harnessing surrounding ambient light energy!

Comments

[powerfool]

Well done!

I've been thinking for some time now to create something like that but I didn't know the way, I didn't think about piezo. I will try to make something that measures how much water passes the tap and displays that on a 2 digit display. I think to actually see the number of litres that are being wasted is more shocking. But I still haven't figured how to measure the quantity of water passing through...
Anyway,
great implementation! Well done!

Dimitris

[thread_soul]

 It is possible you could use the piezo/vibration method here.  I would guess there is a correlation between the vibration level with the water pressure / flowrate.  You could find out by opening the faucet a small amount, record the signal voltage level from piezo circuit then collect and measure the amount of water that came out in a defined amount of time.  Increase the opening of faucet and repeat.

After this you have data relating the vibration signal level to flow rate (volume/time).  If it is linear relationship, you can interpolate/extrapolate a function to create the readout.  If not linear, but is still structured and not random, you can quantize the vibration level depending on how accurate you want the flowrate readout.

could be an interesting way around the usual methods of flowrate sensing, which aren't typically very suitable for small-scale unobtrusive projects.

let us know if you do anything like this, it would be interesting to see the results, I myself would use something like that.