ITDS: An Intelligent Tissue Dispenser System
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is the main contributor in numerous smart applications. The reason is because it offers for 24/7 hours of control and maintenance geographically apart, thus reduces labor or manpower cost significantly. The 3 main components for any IoT applications are the source of power (energy), the microcontroller and the sensor (s) involved. Previous issues mainly related to how long the source of power could last for the applications to continue its operation. This paper presents IoT technology for hygiene application to address the utilization of toilet tissue named as Intelligent Tissue Dispenser System (iTDS). The iTDS device relies on the microcontroller and sensor in order to operate the intended task. The microcontroller used is an IoT based device called ESP8266 which is a WiFi-embedded microcontroller that utilized standard everyday WiFi band frequency which is at 2.4 GHz. For the sensor, an ultrasonic distance measurement device is used. The ultrasonic sensor transmit an ultrasonic wave that hit the object to be measured. Upon hitting the surface of the object to be measured, the wave is then reflected to the receiver of the sensor and the time difference between transmitted wave and received wave is calculated to get the actual distance of the object from the sensor. The main contribution of iTDS is to monitor and track for the toilet tissue to be refilled. The implementation shows the iTDS ables to update for the status of each tissue which reducing the cost of manually human checking for tissue refill.