Four more weeks!

For last week Neshaya did a ton of work to calculate the cost of wasted shower water in cities across North America.  It involved finding the cost of water (including sewer and stormwater charges), along with the groundwater temperature, and the cost of energy in the form of natural gas or electricity needed to heat the water from the groundwater temperature to the hot water tank temperature.

Of all the cities she looked at, Atlanta was the most expensive with an average cost of $680 Canadian dollars per year.  And out of 30 cities, there were only four where our innovation wouldn't pay for itself in less than a year.  I put the data on the map below. 

Annual cost of wasted shower water by city

Nice work Neshaya!

As for the robot, Olivia, and Ella worked on the Water Collection mission and got that working.  If we can fit it in to our 2.5 minutes we'll be able to get almost 400 points if everything works.  Getting everything to work is still a challenge and it's going to require a lot of debugging and practicing between now and January.

Dropping the stacked water in the target area

We put together a list of additional goals for this month and they include:

1) Get more presentation feedback from experts.
2) Show our project to more people who could benefit.
3) Add more project features, including making it look more professional.
4) Print out our sample code and design processes.

We'll work on more of those goals tomorrow!

Project progress

It's been a busy week between meetings.  Olivia and Lily worked on our machine learning model and made some great progress.  If you remember, at the time of the regionals, we could predict showers with 90% accuracy.  Olivia and Lily improved that to 76% over the weekend.  Why is 76% an improvement over 90%, you ask?  Because although the new model heats water more times than necessary, it heats it almost every time it's supposed to.  So, as you can see in the chart below, out of 100 times someone comes into the bathroom, the system only fails to heat the water once.  It heats it 18 times when it doesn't need to, but existing systems heat it 100 times when they don't need to.

In addition, the new system runs on Amazon's computers.  That means that a computer with next to no intelligence can tell it that someone just came into the bathroom, and it will reply telling it whether to heat the water.  Cool!

In addition, Nic was hard at work designing circuit boards.  Here's a picture of a board we sent off to get manufactured for $1 each:

It would fit on top of an Arduino and replace the rats nest of wires we currently see.  The company we sent it to to get made said there are a couple of wires that cross each other that need to go around each other instead, and we need to change that.  That's not a big deal and we can probably fix it this week.  Good work Nic!

Olivia emailed one of the judges from the regionals who said she'd be happy to give us more feedback on our project presentation as we get ready for the Provincials.  That was very nice of her and could be a big help.

I also met with Gary Bennett, one of the property managers we were hoping to talk to before the regionals.  Some of you may remember him from Nature's Fury.  He was the mayor of Kingston during the Ice Storm and gave us some great ideas that year.  He said he'd be happy to help us again and hear more about our water saving innovation.

Congratulations!

Congratulations Comet Warriors!  You did very well at the Kingston Regional FLL Tournament on Nov. 18th.  It was an extremely close competition and a cliff hanger up to the end.  There were a number of other excellent teams there but after a lot of work and a bit of luck you're off to the Provincials in Oshawa on Jan 13th.

Here are a few highlights from the Regionals:

Our Best Run of the Day (the Comet Warriors)

Coaches and Mentors (the Comic Worriers)

And don't forget the news coverage, featuring Nic, at:

 Kingston Students Compete in Lego Robotics Competition

A few random shots of people having fun between matches:

Congratulation again to everyone!