Smart Toilet Paper Holder Keeps Track Of White Gold

As we all woke up in 2020 on New Year’s Day, few of us would have predicted how terrible everything would get in just a few short months. Worldwide shortages of toilet paper were just the tip of the iceberg, making everyone more keenly aware of their stocks at home. This was something [thepenguinmaster] decided to take a stab at managing in the cloud. Enter the Smart Toilet Paper Roll.

The device consists of a 3D printed toilet roll holder, outfitted with sensors to track usage of the precious material. A magnetic rotary encoder is used to monitor rotation of the roll, with a LIDAR device used to sense when a user’s hand is in close proximity. Data is trucked to the cloud by an Avnet Azure Sphere MT3620. The link with Azure allows for the automatic generation of graphs and access from anywhere over the Internet.

The project goes to show that just about anything around the house can be monitored over the Internet. We’d love to see the tracker go even further, measuring usage on a per-sheet basis and automatically ordering more when supplies get low. We’ve seen similar work before, too.

24 thoughts on “Smart Toilet Paper Holder Keeps Track Of White Gold

      1. But all you have to do is get the bidet fairy to pick one off the bidet bush for you. It works just like the tooth fairy, only instead of a tooth, you take a $100 bill, and instead of a pillow, you put it into an envelope, and mail it to…

        RW Enterprises Inc.
        PO Box 1337

    1. There is much more cheaper solution:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidet_shower
      An example of installation from Naomi Wu aka “SexyCyborg”:
      https://invidio.us/watch?v=iRduYc6GWHk
      And mirror for tor:
      http://axqzx4s6s54s32yentfqojs3x5i7faxza6xo3ehd4bzzsg2ii4fv2iid.onion/watch?v=iRduYc6GWHk

      By the way you can just simple reuse old shower head or buy a cheap one, well DIY option possible too from HDPE/PC but I’m not sure about pressure but maybe “interlayer” non-planar slicing may help with it.
      pH netral soap + towel reduce TP usage to zero.

    1. Turn count combined with distance from roll exterior to center can be combined after calibration. Aka The toilet paper calibration protocol. Lidar is being setup to measure what’s left in the roll and monitor when the roll is close to exhaustion. The two sensors should do the trick after one roll is used as a calibration.

      Might as well throw in some machine learning, dump data on a block chain, and have and have a self aware quantum computer analyse the big data. Did I miss any buzz words?

  1. Just what we need in Oz at the moment – with 30 new cases in one day (yes that’s right a whopping thirty cases in one day ) the morons are out again and stripped the shelves bare.

    If you’ve never been here you can get a good idea by watching a few episodes of the tv show “ Housos”

  2. When I read “white gold”, the only thing that comes to my mind is an adult cartoon from a while back, where college students discovered a sperm bank nearby, which paid for quality “products”..,

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.