More Hygienic Public Toilet for All of Us!

Let me give you a little bit of introduction. I’m Audrey, a 19-years-old sophomore currently studying in Institut Teknologi Bandung (or Bandung Institute of Technology), majoring in Information Systems and Technology. This blog is different from my weekly blogs, since this is a mid semester exam and our task is..

Making a solution from a problem we encounter in our university using embedded system.

Sounds cool, huh?

So I decided to take a walk around ITB. I looked for things that bother me most. There are a few examples, such as lighting in ITB which is really poor during night, car parking that are full and not tidy, Indonesia Tenggelam (a pool with drawings of Indonesia inside) that keeps spraying me with water when I’m walking around it.

When I did that mini tour, I wanted to go to the toilet. I really needed to pee (I frequently need to go to toilet daily). Then, I went to a toilet in a building in ITB.

Oh, here’s a fun fact. Even though I use toilet a lot, I have never used the water which existed on the toilet’s tub. Wondering why, perhaps? It’s because the water almost always has either weird odor or a not-so-good-looking color.

ITB has many public toilets, and as far as I observe, I can find one public toilet minimum per building. So, the walking distance needed from wherever I am to a toilet is still acceptable. However, only some toilets have decent water quality. Most of the time, the toilets lack of maintenance for hygiene, especially the water in the tub. No, I’m not too clean, the water is just dirty. Here are standards for water to be called clean.

• Physical characteristics: not murky, colorless, odorless, has 10–25 degrees Celcius, no precipitation.
• Chemical characteristics: doesn’t contain any hazardous chemicals and has pH range of 6.5 to 9.2
• Microbiological characteristics: doesn’t contain any bad bacterials

By daily observation, most public toilets in ITB doesn’t fulfill some criterias in physical characteristics such as not murky, colorless, and odorless. Well, I have never tested how it taste or make a pH test there, so until now I don’t know either the water pass the standards or not.

So, I decided to make a water quality monitoring system to handle this problem. The system is going to check the water quality. If the water quality is below standards — and here we’re going to use pH level, it’s going to alert the cleaning service in ITB. So, after the pH sensor receives data, using ESP32 microcontroller, it’s going to transmit the data to cleaning service’s cellphones as a warning — using Wifi, and to LCD put on each toilet by Bluetooth.

Below is the system specifications:

• Using ESP32/ESP8266 Microcontroller
• Using pH sensor which indicates how acidic or basic the water is by measuring pH level
• Connected to cleaning service’s device, one or multiple to transfer data
• Using LCD which is installed in each public toilet
• Microcontrollers communicate with cleaning service via Wi-Fi, because the cleaning service may not be nearby
• Microcontrollers communicate with LCD via Bluetooth because the LCD is installed in each toilet

Overall, this is how my application is going to be used.

My sistem is going to be implemented using hardware and software. As far as I know, this is how the hardware devices are going to be connected in my system. pH sensor is going to be connected to microcontroller using wire jumpers, and ESP-32 or ESP8266 is going to be connected to LCD and Cellphone as display with the help of Bluetooth and Wi-fi (Wireless conection) respectively.

Next, we’re going to talk about the software design. Obviously, we need to design how the program truly works to solve the problem. Below is my design of software.

This flowchart above only shows how the software of the system works during one data reading. It’s going to be in loop while the toilet is still in operational hours.

That’s my solution to water hygiene in toilets in Bandung Institute of Technology. I really hope this can really be implemented.

Adios!