Water Tank Monitoring System

This is a multi-component system for monitoring, logging, and reporting the liquid volume levels of an external water tank.

Contents

• General Usage
• Hardware
• Software
• Installation & Deployment
• Configuration
• Notes
• Resources
• Contribution
• License

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General Usage

Follow the hardware and software installation guides, and see NOTES for more information.

Web View

Coming soon

CouchDB / Fauxton

Access the database at: http://0.0.0.0:5984/_utils

Tank specs

This project is based off a B-3500 horizontal capsule tank with 3200 (imperial) gallon capacity, 7'6" diameter, and 14'6" length.

Note: current tank specs are stored in CouchDB

Hardware

Ultrasonic Sensor HC–SR04

Water level is measured using an ultrasonic sensor suspended vertically inside the tank. Due to the ambient humidity, the sensor must be protected adequately, or it risks corrosion. todo: add more detail here

Raspberry Pi 1 model B

The system is controlled from a Raspberry Pi configured to run continuously as long as there is power. It periodically collects depth measurements from connected sensor(s). A local instance of Apache CouchDB is used to persist the data (and replicate to off-site mirror), provide views for displaying records as a simple web page, and maintain daemonized script(s).

POWER

• Power for the system is provided via 100W pole-mounted solar panels.
• A 12V Deep Cycle battery functions as power source when weather conditions are unfavorable.
• todo: add charge controller info

Software

• Ruby 2.7
  • activesupport
  • activesupport-core-ext
  • couchrest_model
• Python 3
• CouchDB 3
  • Erlang OTP (24.x, 25.x)
  • ICU
  • OpenSSL
  • Mozilla SpiderMonkey (1.8.5, 60, 68, 78, 91)
  • GNU Make
  • GNU Compiler Collection
  • libcurl

Installation & Deployment

HARDWARE

There are two hardware stations that are part of this project. There is the remote, off-grid station, and there is the local, on-grid station.

The remote station is powered by a solar panel connected to a charge controller and a marine battery. There is a Feather M4 Express microcontroller connected to both a radio transceiver and ultrasonic sensor. The Feather M4 polls the sensor, gets the distance to the water level, and uses that radio connected to a directional Yagi antenna to beam the water level data to the local site.

The local station utilizes a Raspberry Pi 4 with an attached radio transceiver, running CouchDB and a script that continually listens for data from the remote system. Upon receiving data, the water level is logged to the CouchDB database, and logic to check for low water levels will trigger a script that messages a Telegram group.

The core components at the remote station:

• Feather M4 Express
• Radio Transceiver
• Connecting Board
• Yagi Antenna
• Datasheet of kind of ultrasonic sensors used

The core components at the local station:

• Raspberry Pi 4
• Pi Radio Transceiver
• Spring Antenna (or similar)

SOFTWARE

See PROVISIONING for instructions.

Configuration

Once setup, you will most likely want to specify custom parameters for your system. Do so by editing the config document in the admin database. Add the following values:

• poll_interval_sensor

  Number of Seconds between water level sensor readings

• poll_interval_alerts

  Number of Seconds to wait between generating alerts

• threshold_low

  Generate an alert if water is at or below this level in Millimeters

Notes

Conventions

• Underscores are used to delineate words in keys (as oppposed to hyphens)

Resources

CouchDB

• https://pouchdb.com/2014/05/01/secondary-indexes-have-landed-in-pouchdb.html
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4812235/whats-the-best-way-to-store-datetimes-timestamps-in-couchdb
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2587345/why-does-date-parse-give-incorrect-results/2587398#2587398
• cloud hosting option 1

Pi, sensors, and networking

• Raspberry Pi sensor: https://www.modmypi.com/blog/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range-sensor-on-the-raspberry-pi
• http://randomnerdtutorials.com/complete-guide-for-ultrasonic-sensor-hc-sr04/
• http://www.instructables.com/id/Measuring-water-level-with-ultrasonic-sensor/
• https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=376722
• Troubleshooting connection to Sensor https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=120112

Contribution

We would be thrilled to have you considering contributing to our project! Whether you're a seasoned developer or just getting started, your contributions are incredibly valuable and can make a significant impact.

If you have any new features, bug fixes, or enhancements in mind, don't hesitate to dive in and submit a pull request. We welcome all ideas and encourage you to share your creativity and expertise!

License

We use the GNU v3 public license. See LICENSE.