smart water bottle lid Project

Over the summer I came up with a project idea to design a device that would track the user's water intake automatically. Through personal experience, it is difficult to record accurately how often you drink in a day in health-fitness apps. Water is essential for a healthy lifestyle and is often overlooked. I wanted to design a product that was an all-in-one solution to smart tracking water intake that would seamlessly fit into the user's life.

The main issue is that it is difficult for the user to accurately measure and record the amount of water they drink in a day. This is made more difficult with a busy schedule, most wouldn't want to deal with the extra inconvenience as part of their routine. Water is essential in living a healthy lifestyle. My concept would remind periodically when to drink and record how much and how often the user drinks. This information would then be easily sent over to the user's phone via BLE and displayed in a companion app. Integration with health/fitness apps could then be explored in the future.

The components used in the project:

• Arduino Nano 33 IoT Microcontroller
• 620mAh Lithium Polymer Battery
• TP4056 Battery Charger Board
• 5v Boost Converter
• GC9A01 round LCD SPI Screen or SSD1306 OLED I2C Screen
• Melexis MLX90614 Infrared Temperature Sensor
• Ultrasonic distance sensor
• LDR photodiode
• 3d printed casing

Other existing products focused on showing the temperature of liquid or UV sterilisation of water, but few companies are focused on smart water tracking. I decided to design my bottle around an existing insulated water bottle that I was already using. My new product is compatible with existing insulated bottles as the bottles used the same lid type. This means that my design would reduce the manufacturing and environmental costs of producing a whole new bottle for their old one to be thrown out to landfill. Just the lid would be replaced with a compatible smart bottle lid. This also keeps the customer happy as they already own a high-quality bottle but now with smart tracking features. Instead of replacing a perfectly functioning product, its gives the product a new feature set with a lower overall cost to produce a solution.

The main features of the smart water bottle lid Include:

• Wireless Bluetooth pairing with the phone to automatically record how much water the person has consumed throughout the day/week/month etc. No more need to manually record in a fitness app which takes time out of the day.
• An OLED screen to show live information such as volume of water, the temperature of water and No. of times a person has drunk that day. With a clean and simplistic UI, it encourages the user to drink more throughout the day.
• Uses pogo pin charging like on a Fitbit to remain fully waterproof and for fast efficient charging. Could also implement wireless Qi charging in the future.
• The overall size of the product is only 10mm taller than the original bottle lid size meaning it is compact enough for everyday use.
• Additionally, the smart bottle lid has a rubber ring to make it easier to open.

On the inside of the device, there are 3 sensors positioned at the bottom pointing toward the water in the bottle. These sensors are:

• An ultrasonic water depth sensor which can detect the surface of the water and can calculate the total volume remaining in the bottle
• A light sensor alongside a 6 axis IMU can calculate the No. of times the bottle has been opened for the person to take a drink.
• A temperature sensor to show accurate temperature data on the OLED screen
• This alongside a Lithium-Ion battery and Arduino Nano board would power and Transmit/control all the information of the device. This altogether with different colour options to suit the target market makes this a suitable product that I would like to make a reality.

  The biggest difficulty in the project is the tight space constraints in the bottle lid. Most of the bottle has to fit through the bottle mouth piece. The bottle lid must be as compact as possible to make it so that it can fit into the user's lifestyle seamlessly. Another difficulty is that the sensors that are typically used in Arduino projects are too big to fit in the project. Therefore it was a challenge to find components that would work in these strict constraints.

  My project is niche since there are other products on the market that require a whole new bottle just for smart tracking features. Insulated water bottles are already very popular and do their job well to begin with. Just with a small add on it can change the whole user experience.

  Throughout this project, I have learned many things about prototyping, 3d printing and designing a product from scratch. My process for developing my product is to accurately measure the components and recreate them in CAD. With an accurate CAD model, it is much easier to visualise how to mount the components in the casing. I have greatly improved my knowledge about electronics. Picking each component carefully and considering the physical constraints of the lid.

  A mass-produced commercial product would most likely require a full custom PCB to connect all the sensors together. The screen, battery and other components could then be attached to an internal dodder board. This would help in assembly and would neatly connect to the microcontroller. With economies of scale, the price for each sensor, microcontroller, screen etc. would decrease making the product more competitive against the competition.

  There are still many things I am working on such as the mounting of the screen and battery changing board. Then wiring and creating the code for everything to work together. Haven't gotten to that stage just yet but I'm looking forward to learning more about electronics and coding to help me develop my product further.