Shower Timer Talking was uploaded to the Google Play Store last night and is now available on the play store.
Shower Timer Talking was uploaded to the Google Play Store last night and is now available on the play store.
 | Peter Robinson on Shower Timer Talking Rele… |
 | Andreas Hagele on Shower Timer Talking Rele… |
nelladragon 
April 7, 2016 at 4:21 am
Hi there,
just tried your shower timer and it’s very good. Tried half a dozen and this is the best.
I am on and off thinking about writing/making one myself but can’t get past the great ideas on features to put in.
The first plan was to use custom hardware like a Arduino or RPI but Android is the simplest (cheapest).
High on the desired list of feature suggestions would to a noise triggered start/stop function. Basically record the noise of the shower and then trigger the timer automatically when detected. Would be a fairly involved process to do a reliable detection (filtering out other ambient noises). With it an old/broken Android device could be stationed in bathroom permanently as a dedicated timer. That would allow to e.g. add some logging to monitor/chart the water
usage etc. – shower police here we go.
Thanks for a great app.
Cheers
Andreas
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April 10, 2016 at 12:52 am
Hi Andreas,
I am glad you like the app.
The next set of features I plan to put in are to expand the languages that the shower timer talks in and to add a few more jokes. I have had requests to add German and Mandarin so they will be the first languages to be added. The challenge is to come up with jokes and thoughts that make sense in each language.
You could create a similar program using a Raspberry PI. It would be difficult to match the features of a telephone: touch screen, battery, speaker, voice to text engine as part of the platform, some degree of water proof cover. If you wanted other people to use the program, then Android and iOS have the great advantage of being a hardware platform billions of people have, and there are great distribution channels: Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
Having a system which automatically turned on when the shower turns on has several issues. One is that this would mean recording audio from a bathroom, which could be construed as an invasion of privacy.
Another issue is power consumption. Listening and processing audio would use power 24 hours a day, for only a few minutes real app usage per day. The app currently only uses power when the timer is on. That is, when the timer is on, the screen stays on and the phones speaker is used. When the “Stop” button is pressed and the “Start” screen becomes active, screen turns off automatically after a few seconds (depends on the phones configuration). We have an old Samsung Galaxy S3 in our bathroom. With the phone in “Flight Mode”, and being used for three or four showers a day, the battery lasts for around two weeks.
A third issue is the detection of water turning on. The acoustics of each bathroom is likely to be different, and as such the sound of running water would be different. Additionally, I suspect that the sound of a tap running in a sink and the sound of a shower could be similar. Given this, it is likely to be a very complicated task detecting a shower turning on, and differentiating between that and other sounds.
Peter
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