Making some good progress on V2 of the DIY sensor. The idea to bluetooth the sensor to the phone worked out better than I thought:
Next step is to solder the sensor breakout board to an Arduino prototype shield instead of the white proto board you see there (that should also remove a bunch of stray capacitance from that proto board).
Note that I even put in some notifications on the phone. One for "almost full" >75% and one for "Full" >95%.