You Probably Don’t Want To Find This Toilet In Your Washroom

Ok, this one is a bit bizarre, but in perfect keeping with the subject matter: a talking toilet ripped from the pages of the Captain Underpants children’s books. Hackaday.io user [hamblin.joe]’s county fair has a toilet decorating contest and at the suggestion of their neighbour’s son, [hamblin.joe] hatched a plan to automate the toilet using an Arduino in the fashion of the hero’s foes.

Two Arduinos make up this toilet’s brains, an Adafruit Wave Shield imbues it with sound capabilities, and a sonic wave sensor will trigger the toilet’s performance routine when someone approaches. A windshield wiper motor actuates the toilet bowl lid via a piece of flat iron bar connected to a punched angle bracket. Installing the motor’s mount was a little tricky, since it had to be precisely cut so it wouldn’t shift while in the toilet bowl. A similar setup opens the toilet tank’s lid, but to get it working properly was slightly more involved. Once that was taken care of there was enough room left over for a pair of 12V batteries and a speaker. Oh, and a pair of spooky eyes and some vicious looking teeth.

If you have a limited number of bathrooms at home or at work, some signage would be useful to know when it’s free and how dangerous it is to enter.

12 thoughts on “You Probably Don’t Want To Find This Toilet In Your Washroom

  1. The Fair is over, 8 days, 12 hours running. I learned that I hughly under estimated how much power the speaker would need, it ran on 4 AAA batteries, I converted this too use second 12v batteries. That would run for 6 – 8 hrs that way. I only had one battery charger with me so charging two batteries was difficult (again your at a Fair). The eyes stopped working towards the end. The bowl motor worked like a champ the entire time, and would run for about 8 hours one one 12v motor cycle battery.
    The Toilet was a hit, there where lots of people stopping to look at it and I heard people talking about it, mission accomplished. Now I need to plan for next year.

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