How much water have you had to drink today? We would venture to guess that the answer is somewhere between ‘absolutely none’ and ‘not not nearly enough’. You can go ahead and blame poor work/life balance — that’s our plan, anyway — and just try to do better. All this working from home means the bathroom situation is now ideal, so why not drink as much water as you can?

But how? Well, you’re human, so you’ll need to make it as easy as possible to drink the water throughout the day. You could fill up one big jug and hoist it to your mouth all day long (or use a straw), but facing that amount of water all at once can be intimidating. The problem with using a regular-sized vessel is that you have to get up to refill it several times per day. When hyper-focus is winning the work/life tug-of-war, you can’t always just stop and go to the kitchen. What you need is an automatic water dispenser, and you need it right there on the desk.

[Javier Rengel]’s water pomodoro makes it as easy as setting your cup down in front of this machine and leaving it there between sips. As long as the IR sensor detects your cup, it will dispense water every hour. This means that if you don’t drink enough water throughout the day, you’re going to have it all over the desk at some point. [Javier] simply connected an Arduino UNO to a water pump and IR sensor pair and repurposed the milk dispenser from a coffee machine. Check it out in action after the break.

Of course, if you aren’t intimidated by the big jug approach, you could keep tabs on your intake with the right kind of straw.

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Using Arduino Micro to control a fountain is the project shared by Michael Diesing on Twitter:

May I introduce my second ARDUINO-project with own pcb. With the pcb I am able to drive seven brushless pumps(with integrated electronics). The “problem” with such kind of pumps is that they don’t accept unfiltered pwm-signals as supply voltage. So I created a circuit where the pwm-signals of an ARDUINO-micro are level-shifted to 12V with a darlington array and afterwards filtered with a 1 uF ceramic capacitor and a 730 Ohm resistor (low pass filter). The signals are then led into the adjust-pins of seven “lm317″s. To work properly I needed to connect the adjust-pins also with 2500 Ohm resistors to gnd, but I found out that with two l293d instead of the used TDP62783 (darlington array) these resistors are not needed, but different resistor and capacitor values for adequate filtering!
The pums also have tacho signals which I connected via schottky-diodes to the ARDUINO (inputs with pullup). With the tacho-signals I am able to find out if pumps are stuck, are sucking air or are not connected.
Additionally I added one ACS712-05B current sensor (which measures the entire current of the circuit) that could be used to find out if pumps that don’t have tacho-signals are working properly. At the moment it is not used.
Besides that I integrated a lm386 audio-amp used to amplify the signal of an electret-mic to a level that is suitable for the ATEMGA’s ADC.

As the first project for the pcb I created a fountain consisting of a shortened wine barrel, seven brushless pumps, a pushbutton with led and pebbles (s. video).
There are seven animation-modes which can be selected via the pushbutton (the selected mode is stored in eeprom).
The speed of the pumps is checked permanently during operation.
The average power consumption is ~20W and max. consumption is 30W.

Discover the different modes to control it reading the description on youtube video.