kokuda / watermonitor_controller

Well water pumphouse microcontroller monitoring projects for monitoring the depth of a water tank and reporting to the watermonitor_server.

Watermonitor Controller

Well water pumphouse esp8266 nodemcu 1.0 microcontroller project for monitoring the depth of a water tank and room temperature, reporting to the io.adafruit.com.

Installation

Dependencies required to build this...

Boards

Configure Arduino IDE for esp8266

Install the esp8266 boards through the Arduino IDE APP

Tools->Board->Board Manager

Search for "esp8266"

Libraries

Adafruit Unified Sensor by Adafruit (Tested with 1.1.9)
DHT sensor library by Adafruit (Tested with 1.4.4)
ArduinoJson by Benoit Blanchon (Tested with 6.21.2)
Adafruit MQTT Library by Adafruit (Tested with 2.5.4)

Configuration

Open the project with your favourite Arduino IDE. I use Visual Studio Code, but it should work from the default Arduino IDE

Create a file called configData.h and include two macros, WIFI_SSID and WIFI_PASSPHRASE like this

#define WIFI_SSID "MyWifiName"
#define WIFI_PASSPHRASE "MyWifiPassword"

Create an account at io.adafruit.com. Create a file called configAdafruitMqtt.h and define the following macros with the appropriate values.

#define AIO_SERVER      "io.adafruit.com"
#define AIO_USERNAME    "Your Adafruit account name"
#define AIO_KEY         "Your Adafruit key"
#define AIO_SERVERPORT  1883

Wiring

A design and components are available on EasyEDA. You can also order PCBs directly from them from them with this design. Note that the pin usage is slightly different than the code to make the PCB design a bit simpler. The code will be updated with the changes.

Download and order the PCB

Output

When the data is regularly published to io.adafruit.com, you can create a dashboard of various stats, including water depth, distance from sensor to water, temperature, and humidity.

Here is a 1 week duration depth chart showing the changes in water depth as the tank is filled and drained.

Final Result

See Also

The original server project watermonitor_server. The intention was for the monitor to post to this server, but using the MQTT server at io.adafruit.com was easier. The server may find a dual purpose as a trigger notification from io.adafruit.com to trigger emails when exceptional events occur.

watermonitor_controller's Issues

Add lowpass filter to output data

Add new feeds of data that include a lowpass filter to smooth the inconsistencies in reported data. The cheap sensors are not calibrated or consistent over small periods of time and the graphs would be less jittery if the random variations were smoothed.

Adafruit.io does not appear to support filtering the data for the graphs, so it will have to be done at the source.

Depth is returning cm in integers

The depth, when measured in cm, should be a floating point value instead of integer.