[Pool Water Monitoring] #21 - Project Liftoff

Hi all ! Hope everyone is well and safe.

It finally happen ! We just went live.

This weekend was the time to finally put everything together and just turn it on.

Data collecting

One of the Arduinos MKR 1300 WAN is inside of one of Hammond's enclosures - the transparent lid one.

This one was put near the pool to monitor.

One of the antennas that I bought (on the first design, the enclosure was to be inside water and the antenna had to be long enough to be outside) is magnetic, so I've glued (double side tape) a metal washer on the lid and the antenna just sits there.

Inside sits all of the electronics.  This is, for now, sending data every 30m. For testing purposes. Later will be increased to every hour.

Here are some photos

What's left

On this side, I'm going to find a contraption to arrange the cables to be farther from the wall.

Data receiving

On the data receiving, like I've already said, I went back to my original design. So, I have the Groove shield connected to an Arduino UNO Rev 3.

Here are some photos of the MKR 1300 WAN and the UNO

And here's some photos of all of this working. The values displayed are real values taken from the pool water.

I'm sorry for the dark photos, but otherwise, like you can see in the photo above, the values in the display would not be visible.

As you can see, one of the values, the display turns to red.  That's because, in one of my earlier posts, I've talked about what was going to be measured and the safe values. Because the water temperatures is at 10 degrees C, it's outside safe parameters, thus, appearing in red. This will be talked in a near future, when I post about the code.

Do to

In my original design, one of the targets was to have the values uploaded to Arduino IoT Cloud . My original idea was to use MKR 1300 WAN. But, for it to be able to send values to the Arduino IoT Cloud, I had to use a LoRa Gateway.  Unfortunately, I'm not near one.

The next idea was to use WiFi and send it to ThingSpeak . Grove has a new WiFi module - UART Wifi V2. I did try to use this one, but after a few days, I wasn't able to make it work. The documentation  on the Grove Wiki is not very good for this new module.

I haven't given up. I will try to make work with a ESP8266 - ESP-01.(I don't have an Arduino UNO WiFI) In the meanwhile, I'm saving the values to a SD Card, by using a Micro SD Card breakout. The photos above don't reflect this yet, but I will update them.

Wha't next

Since this has started live yesterday, I'm still observing . I did notice some weird behaviors.  When still in testing, the deep sleep functions on the data collecting side, in the MKR 1300 WAN are not very precise.  It was collecting the data and then sleeping for 20 seconds (20.000 milliseconds) .  I was counting the time, and sometimes it would take more than 20s to wake up and send the values.

If I put it to sleep for 1h - 3600000 milliseconds, I thing it never wakes up.. Never got an answer from it. Still have to try to look deeper into this. But I'm guessing I'm not the only one reporting on this.

Will keep you guys informed.

Stay safe and stay well.