“Living with med-student mates means sharing everything from stethoscopes to strep throat,” says Tye D. Haus. “But I’m the only one working double shifts when it comes to cleaning. We need prophylactic action before our house becomes a health hazard.”
Flatmates too busy scrubbing up for surgery to clean up the home? How about a digital matron to keep track of how many days it has been since anyone did the dirty work? That should keep things orderly.
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It needs two parts: a detector and a display. I prescribe a pair of wireless, battery-powered micro:bit boards. Their 70-metre radio range means unless you’ve got a really big house your cleaning will register. Once one is attached to the vacuum cleaner, the accelerometer on the micro:bit can tell us if it has been moved. However, preliminary tests – me bashing against the closed cupboard door – activated the accelerometer before I had used the vacuum. So I updated the micro:bit to trigger only with continuous motion, preventing a false positive – the erroneous conclusion that someone had done the cleaning when they hadn’t.
Now for the display. The electronics are concealed behind a sheet of paper that says “…days since I last vacuumed”, with space for the other micro:bit. I found that the built-in LED screen wasn’t shaming enough when read at 10 paces. I needed it writ large. So I added a larger seven-segment digital display – the same as you get on a microwave oven –flaring a scornful shade of red. That left the micro:bit’s screen free to supply scrolling text-based admonishment or encouragement, such as an estimate of the weight of shed human skin accumulated in the carpet since the last clean.
It has been such a success that we have extended the treatment. We now have metrics for when we last did washing, watered the garden and took the bins out. We can’t rest until all the displays read 0. The flat is clinically clean, but I wonder if we have introduced a new health hazard. You might want to drop in on the psychology department if you do this and it gets a bit much.
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