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!

Less than a Month

This past week has been very busy and productive!  Nice work, everyone.  In addition to last Wednesday's meeting we had another garage sale on Saturday along with more building and project work, and another team meeting on Monday.

Where this puts us with just under a month to go is:

Robot: Can accomplish all missions for Zones 1, 2, and 3, for a total of 190 points.  If everything goes smoothly we can get those 90 points with slightly less than a minute to spare, so we can likely add more missions over the next few weeks.  We need, though, to focus on reliability.  That means doing more of what we did yesterday: running missions over and over to find out where things go wrong and improving them, and getting used to setting up and running the robot repeatably.

Project: We've had Hannah's prototype for a few weeks now, and she's gotten some good practice presenting it.  In addition, Nic's made good progress on an Arduino-based version of Hannah's prototype, which if it can work would cost a lot less, use less energy, and be less obvious in a bathroom.

We still need to work on our team presentation, and have been talking about a Phineas and Ferb skit where our project foils the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz and his plan to take over the tri-state area.  Think hard about how we can fit all the information we need to present into that type of skit.

Core Values: With a lot of help from Ella team spirit and teamwork have been really improving.  In fact, I believe there was a coach-free meeting at school to discuss how to organize a book sale. Check Slack to see Ella's suggestions for how to answer judges' questions.  We'll be working on this tomorrow.

5 Weeks to Go

With five weeks to go before the regionals, we've got our work cut out for us.  Good work on Ella's core values exercise!  If we can complete each other's sentences we're a close-knit team for sure!

Helen took us through an important communication exercise and discussion of project tasks.  Below is the prioritized list of project features we came up with, based on how much people complained about existing problems and how hard we thought they'd be to solved.

At the top of the list are a) Too slow, b) Uses too much gas/electricity, c) Timer is too difficult to adjust, and d) Too noisy)

Prioritized list of product features.

These four items are things we said were important and easy to do.  So, how do we do them?  (Or any of the others on the list for that matter?)  Please get on Slack and post your suggestions!

Bill Allen discussing hot water problems with the team.

It was great to meet Bill Allen (that name is one of several possible facts you'll need to know for the homework exercise).  He is an actual plumbing expert, given his years of experience both as a plumber himself and as an owner of a plumbing company.  It was good to get his suggestions on approaches to our problem.  One of his suggestions was to connect the pump to the shower light switch, so that when somebody turns on the shower light the water gets heated automatically.  It would be good to know how many showers have a light just for the shower.  For homework please check the showers in your house and see whether there's a light just for the shower, or whether the light is for the whole bathroom.  It probably wouldn't be ideal to heat the water every time someone turned on the bathroom light.

Lastly, with some mentoring from Ella, we made some good progress on the robot.  Hannah, Tara, Macy, and Alyssa sped up the Flow mission and made it more reliable, and also completed the Faucet mission.  That gets us to a reliable 120 points, up from last week's 95.  Good job!

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving Comet Warriors!  Good work last week, and congratulations to Nick on the Homework Award.

Among other things, we got 3 out of 4 Zone 1 missions working, some of which are shown in the video below:

In addition, with the cancellation of the weekend Garage Sale due to bad weather, we got the Pump Addition mission finished as well.  That finishes off Zone 1.  Those missions together give us 95 points with another five and a half weeks before the tournament.  Not bad, but still plenty of work left to do.

Thank you Ella for another interesting, fun, and valuable Core Values exercise.  Building a Lego model of our research problem was a great teamwork exercise and the team did much better than we did at the start of the season.

Olivia posted a document on Slack listing the problems people have with existing Hot Water Recirculation products.  Please read it!  We've got a solution to one of these problems, we hope, but there are still plenty more.  For this week please think hard about how these remaining problems could be fixed.  Could we make the timer easier to adjust?  How?  Could we make the water heat up quicker?  How?  And so on.

If we can decide whether these problems are easy, medium, or difficult to solve we could combine that information with how much people complain about them and come up with a prioritized list of which problems to work on.

Also, on the topic of the project, Macy's Uncle Bill (name of the week) may be able to visit with us on Wednesday to give his thoughts on what we're trying to do.  So come prepared to discuss our project so far, and whatever additional ideas you come up with between now and then.

Lastly, the First Lego League organizers would like to know who would like badges this season showing how many years they've been involved with FLL.  The badges are a few dollars each, so if you'd like one let us know.

A Busy Week

Congratulations, Warriors, on a very busy and productive week!  Our yard sale was a big success, raising $190.  Kudos to Neshaya for organizing that, and thanks to everyone for helping out, manning tables, recruiting customers, and rounding up donations.

Alyssa and Macy Selling Like Crazy

For our project we did a lot of work to understand how much energy is required to heat water, how much water needs to be heated to start a shower, and how much energy is required to keep heating it while the shower is running.  We also learned how quickly the heat is lost once the shower stops, whether its through plastic or copper pipes, 1/2" or 3/4" diameter, and insulated or not.

Lais Heating Water

Nick Logging Data

Cooling Rates for PEX Pipes

With all of this information we should be able to figure out how much it costs to operate different solutions to our problem of wasted water.

We also worked on prototypes of our innovative solution.  Existing solutions either heat the water whenever it goes cold, or else whenever it gets cold within certain hours.  Using Lego controllers, motors, and sensors, Hannah built a hot water re-circulation system that only turns on if a) someone enters the bathroom, and b) the water is cold.  It then recirculates the hot water until the water in the pipe is hot, and then stops.  It does this by sending Bluetooth (wurd of the week)  messages from an EV3 that would go under the sink, to a second EV3 at the water tank which would turn the water on and off.  Congratulations, Hannah!  If we make no further progress we've at least got a working prototype of our system.

Lily and Olivia worked on the missions for Zone 1 over the weekend and can fairly reliably do the Water Filtration and Pump Addition missions, with good progress on the Rain mission as well.

This week we hope to make more progress on the robot missions, and to look for ways to improve or reduce the cost of our prototype solution.