Our Robo-Toilet

I first encountered a RoboToilet on my first trip to Japan, in 1999. I was on a business trip to Sharp Headquarters, in Kyoto, and I contracted food poisoning (that's my luck--to get food poisoning in the cleanest country in the universe). Around 2 AM, my stomach performed several back flips and I realized that something was amiss. Half an hour later, I thought I was going to die.

The bathroom in my hotel room was a pod-like unit of molded plastic--sink, showers, walls, and floor all one piece. The toilet, however, was separate, and was a sight to behold: it had a set of armrest controls, like Captain Kirk's chair, and a little robotic arm which swung out from beneath the rim and did stuff. I spent the whole night and most of the morning on that toilet, and by the time I left the country, me'n'RoboToilet were best friends!

Our RoboToilet is a Toto Brand Washlet S300, and it was a gift from a friend.

It's actually just a seat which installs on a normal toilet, but it needs its own electrical outlet. When we remodeled our bathroom, we specifically requested an electrical outlet for just this purpose.

Behold: The RoboToilet!

Once installed, the RoboToilet looks like any other toilet seat--except for various menacing-looking lines and cables snaking out the side.

Also, the seat hinge has a set of curious indicator LEDs and an infrared sensor.

The RoboToilet has a wireless remote control, which gives a good idea of the major features:

• you can activate the Robotic Arm, which will spray pulsing warm water on your nether regions (front and back). You can also adjust the angle, temperature, and pulse width (pulse width modulation for you engineers).

• you can activate a heated blow dryer

In addition, the seat is heated. It notes what time of day you're likely to use the toilet and pre-heats itself in anticipation of use. Now that's service.

Being a Japanese product, the remote control reveals a plethora of additional buttons, hidden behind a drop-down panel:

I believe that under the hood, the thing is written in Lisp on top of embedded Linux.

Here's a typical session on the RoboToilet:

• upon sitting down, the RoboToilet detects your presence (or, more precisely, the presence of your ass) with its infrared eye, and a flurry of activity starts beneath you: the charcoal-filter "deoderizer" fan starts to whir, and the RoboToilet rinses its robo-arm with a trickle of water.

• if you are using the RoboToilet during your usual hours, then RoboToilet has been expecting you and greets you with a pre-warmed seat! Otherwise, the seat warms up in less than a minute. The RoboToilet saves energy by keeping track of your daily usage, and heating the seat only at those times.

• Then you login: ssh rob@robotoilet.robertyu.com. When the shell prompt appears, you do your business.

• after you are done, you hit one of the cleansing buttons. You can fiddle with the angle, pressure, and pulse. I think you can play Donkey Kong too.
• after "cleansing," you can use the dryer button to, you know, dry yourself.
• Then you logoff.
• try as you might, you can't slam the toilet seat because the hinge is pneumatically dampened!

Don't you want a RoboToilet??