Originally posted by joe shmo
Sophmore, Mechanical, so we really dont know all that much about engineering, we are still hammering out the fundimentals...
Its supposed to be modest in scope. I'm really just conducting this as a survey to see what people may have come across that they thought could have been done better ect...random simple ideas. Its for a Design course. So we dont ...[text shortened]... al enough...so we scrambling around try to find an alternative. but the clock is ticking...haha
I have some projects already going so here is a freebie:
You know how there are waterless toilets, for urinating only, maybe you saw them, I see them showing up at our local cinema's. I was thinking about how to save water in home toilets and thought about this: A friend told me once, 'If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down'. So I was thinking, a way to save water would be if you made up a simple sensor, maybe a laser and APD, something like that, that could tell the difference if the water was more or less transparent or if there was stuff there that blocked the light. Now if women P, they leave behind paper usually, so it would not do a 50% reduction in water, but when a man P's, he usually does not leave paper so in that case, the sensor set would inhibit a flush. Now after a few male P's, the water would get progressively more opaque, so there would be something like a schmitt trigger, like a 339 chip that toggles when the water gets to a certain turbidity. THEN it flushes. See how that would save water and how many toilets there are in the world? If implemented even in just the US, it would clearly save millions of gallons of water. enjoy🙂