A smart coaster for drinking water

overview

Winner of the Leslie eLab Prototyping Award 2014
Role: UX Design and Development
Team members: Abhishek Singh(Development / Fabrication) and Dalit Shalom(Visual Design)
October - December 2014

Hydrate.me is an electronic coaster that works by sensing the amount of liquid remaining in your bottle and providing a corresponding graphic representation. According to your timer settings, you will be reminded once every so often to drink, and notified when you need to refill your bottle.

prototyping in various materials

PROTOTYPE AND EXTERIOR

Since the topic addressed is water, we decided the final prototype should be made out of organic materials. Plywood seemed to be a good material we could use to cut the layers of the coaster and stack them on top of each other. Each layer was crafted to contain and support the various components: an Arduino microcontroller, a shield connected to the top of the Arduino, LEDs, the force-sensor(FSR), and of course, all of the wiring.

PROGRAMMING THE SENSORS

We used both Arduino and Processing to sense the weight on the coaster and represent it in a beautiful graphical interface.

DesigNING the interface

The interface we created is a widget built to live on the desktop of a personal computer. The user may set the timer to increments of time in which he would like to be reminded to drink. The water animation is mapped with the data from the pressure sensor and responds accordingly.

FINAL PRODUCT