So our Hackathon technically ended yesterday, but that doesn’t mean we’re through shining the light on some of the great projects that presented on our stage.
Take Mexico-based startup Driblet, for instance. The three-person team (who just recently took home the top prize at AngelHack Monterrey) makes a smart water meter that connects to the water pipes in your house. It sits between the pipe and your shower head for instance or between the pipe and your faucet. Nestled inside the device is a slew of sensors that measures (among other things) water flow and the levels of foreign substances in that water, just to make sure you’re working with the really good stuff.
It sounds neat and all, but that data is essentially useless if you can’t get it off the device and interpret it. That’s why the Driblet team added a Wi-Fi module into the mix — it uploads all of that information into the Driblet backend, where users can access it by way of a mobile and web app. From there people can dig into how much water they use whenever they bathe or wash the dishes, and even set limits on how much water they (or other, more wasteful members of the household) should be using. Once people start getting close to that limit, a small LED on the front of the sensor will turn yellow and eventually red to signal that a shutdown is necessary.
Now Driblet’s big goal here is to try and help its users both save money and conserve water whenever possible. Still, that didn’t stop the team from baking in a curious social angle here, too — users can add friends through the apps and compete to see who’s being the most conservative with their water. Eventually the team hopes to ink retail deals to get their sensor into big-box stores across the country, but for now they’re looking to start things off slowly with a Kickstarter campaign that will launch on October 1.
Just be warned: you shouldn’t expect a final, fully polished product when that campaign kicks off. The Driblet team confirmed that they only plan to offer a limited number of its water sensors as a sort of beta test to figure out if everything works the way it’s supposed to and to gauge the demand for yet another interesting connected home gadget. A mild bummer, sure, but considering the sort of good this thing could do, a little fine-tuning period would be nice.