If you’re blessed with high water pressure at home, you probably love how it helps blast grime from your dishes and provides a pleasant washing experience. However, it can also cause a wonderful mess when that water splashes all over your countertops. [vgmllr] has whipped up a simple solution to this problem by installing an automatic splash guard.

The concept is simple enough—install a pair of flat guards that raise up when the sink is running, in order to stop water getting everywhere. To achieve this, [vgmllr] grabbed an Arduino, and hooked it up to a piezo element, which acts as a water sensor.

The piezo is attached to the bottom of the sink, and effectively acts as a microphone, hooked up to one of the Arduino’s analog-to-digital pins. When water flow is detected, the Arduino commands two servos to raise a pair of 3D printed arms that run up and down the outside of the sink. Each arm is fitted with magnets, which mate with another pair of magnets on the splash shields inside the sink. When the arms go up, the splash shields go up, and when the arms go down, the splash shields go down.

It’s an ingenious design, mostly because the installation is so clean and seamless. By using magnets to move the splash shields, [vgmllr] eliminated any need to drill through the sink, or deal with any pesky seals or potential water leaks. Plus, if the splash shields are getting in the way of something, they can easily be popped off without having to disassemble the entire mechanism.

It’s a tidy little build, both practical and well-engineered. It’s not as advanced as other kitchen automations we’ve seen before, but it’s elegant in its simple utility.

The cooker hood is a wonderful invention for removing excess fumes and steam from the kitchen. But like all electrically-powered devices, it only works when it is turned on. This was the problem facing [Peter], whose family are enthusiastic cooks who frequently forget to hit that switch. His solution? An automatic cooker hood switch that comes on when the cooker is in use, and stays on long enough afterwards to fully dissipate the fumes.

At its heart is a current transformer on the 3-phase stove power line, and we’re treated to a lesson in reading from these devices with an Arduino. They have a shunt resistor across which to produce a voltage, and their AC output is placed upon a reference DC voltage to supply the microcontroller pin. The impedance is quite high, so when the sensor had to be placed a distance from the microcontroller it necessitated an op-amp buffer. The readings then cause the Arduino to trigger a pair of relays to switch on or off the cooker hood. We can imagine that the family kitchen is thus a much pleasanter environment for it.

Cookers can also provide quite a hazard when they are left on. To that end, we’ve also featured a cooker alarm in the past.

Header image: Pbroks13, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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This is the most complete robot I've ever made.  That's because I intentionally killed it right after I made the video:

I was so sick of this thing that I did what anyone would do: I stuck an X-acto knife in his head.

BubbleBot started life as an RC Car:

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