About
I used to live in front of a beautiful but polluted lake in Londrina city. Now I live in Curitiba city, some say the most ecological Brazilian city.
Urban socio-environmental problems identified in Curitiba includes air pollution, water pollution and environmental degradation (references).
This project is developed with the objective of creating low-cost water monitoring stations, enabling the creation of a dense monitoring network with the capacity to locate occurrences of water pollution and contamination.
With community and educational purposes in mind, information about suppliers, configurations, and software are all open-source.
The current state of the project is hardware and software prototyping. A prototype was tested on the Atuba River, near a place known as Ecobarreira do Atuba. It was “on” for 36 hours, but the battery died at the end of the night and it didn’t turned back “on” when the sun recharged the battery.
The software has been improved to use the microcontroller’s “deep sleep” mode and on the desk the battery lasted over 100 hours sending data every 6 minutes. Unfortunately it has a bad performance in the rain. Probably the Micro USB connection do not work well with water.
This is the prototype deployed:
This is the prototype in greater detail:
Current Hardware
- Atlas Scientific Wi-Fi Pool Kit (Legacy, with ESP8266). It has pH, ORP (Oxidation Reduction Potential) and Temperature probes and comes with Wi-Fi connectivity.
- LILYGO® TTGO T-BAT Battery Holder. Battery holder and solar panel charging circuit. It can provide power to Wi-Fi Pool Kit.
Future Work
Some locations where it would be good to have monitoring stations don’t have Wi-Fi access point. So cellular or even satellite connectivity are necessary.
- LILYGO® TTGO T-SIM7000G. For cellular connectivity this low-power, low-cost board comes with Espressif’s ESP32 microcontroller, SIMCom’s 7000G cellular modem, battery holder and solar power circuit at around 170 Brazilian Reais. ESP32 is more capable than Arduino and less expensive than Raspberry Pi.
As polluted or contaminated “water” can deteriorate the probes, requiring more robust (more expensive) hardware and greater maintenance labor, gas sensors can be used over the water course:
References
- Danos Socioambientais Urbanos Em Curitiba: Uma Abordagem Geográfica (PDF)