Project14 | The Birthday Special: Arduino in Remote Monitoring Projects!

20 Mar 2020

Enter Your Project for a chance to win a Nano Grand Prize bundle for the most innovative use of Arduino plus a $400 shopping cart!

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Arduino is celebrated its 15th Birthday on March 21st, 2020! We'll be up to sending 25 Nano Boards (5 different Flavors) for project proposals that use them!	Project14 is celebrating its 3rd Birthday with a NanoRama Celebration that began the day before Arduino Day! Help us celebrate by submitting an Arduino Project as a Birthday Present!	Winners Announcement will be on Geek Pride Day on May 25th 2020. It also happens to be the anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars movie. A New Hope was released on May 25th, 1977!

Project14 | The Birthday Special: A NanoRama Open Arduino Competition!

Submit a Blog in NanoRama or tag your post NanoRamaCH for a Chance to Win!

This special event celebrates the 3rd birthday of Project14 and the 15th birthday of Arduino with an Open Ended Arduino project competition that kicks off the day before Arduino Day on March 21st, 2020. The NanoRama project competition is a follow up to Arduino Day 2020: NanoRama: We're Giving Away Different Nano Boards for Projects that Use Them! We also launched an Arduino Fundamentals: Part I: Quiz where you can test your knowledge (or argue over) your knowledge of Arduino. We will also have a round ups of the last two Arduino project competitions to celebrate Arduino Day in what has turned into an annual tradition.

Arduino Day 2020 Round Ups:

Project14 | The Birthday Special: Arduino in IoT in the Cloud Projects!
Project14 | The Birthday Special: Arduino in Robotics Projects!
Project14 | The Birthday Special: Arduino in Programmable Logic Projects!
Project14 | The Birthday Special: Arduino in Remote Monitoring Projects!
Project14 | The Birthday Special: Arduino in Electronic Toy Projects!
Project14 | The Birthday Special: Arduino in RF (Radio Frequency) Projects!
Project14 | The Birthday Special: Arduino in Energy Harvesting Projects!

We're also aware that this is difficult time around the world, the Covid-19 Virus has upended life as we know it.

Your project can also include a Fighting Germs project as suggested in Project14 | Fighting Germs: Win a Thermal Imaging Camera, a Germicidal Lamp, and a Shopping Cart with Matching Charity Donation!

Simply tag your post FightingGermsCH and NanoRamaCH if your Fighting Germs project uses an Arduino.

The Grand Prize

Every Nano Board	Plus a $400 Shopping Cart

Your Chance to Win a Nano Classic, Nano Every, Nano 33 IoT, Nano BLE, and Nano BLE Sense!	Plus a $400 Shopping Cart to Do Cool Stuff with Your Boards!

First Place & Finisher Prizes

Three First Place Winners Receive a $200 Shopping Cart to Any of Our Stores!	Finisher Prizes
3 First Place Winners Receive a Nano BLE Sense plus a $200 Shopping Cart!	We have up to 20 Nano (Classic Boards) to Giveaway for Amazing Projects!

The Projects:

Fuzzy Plant Watering System by BigG:

Fuzzy Plant Watering System

LoRa Experimental Environmental Sensors (LoRaXes) by ralphjy:

ralphjy 's project LoRaXes is a loose reference to a Dr. Seuss character in a book about the plight of the environment during the industrial age. He began building a pair of outdoor LoRa sensors to use for GPS, temperature/humidity/pressure, ambient light, water level, and PIR. He started his project to find a use for a Things LoRa Gateway and two MKR WAN 1300 boards that he won as the Grand Prize in the IoT: In the Cloud challenge. This was his first experience with LoRa and the Things Network.

Goals achieved:

Connect gateway to Things Network - there were only five LoRa gateways within a 50 km radius of my location that were connected to the Things Network, so he added access for sensors near him.
Build two portable battery operated sensor units - he only fully completed assembly of one of the units, but he's tested the electronics for both.
Connect both units to the Things Network - he has unique applications running for each MKR Wan 1300 on the Things Network console.
Provide GPS functionality for one of the units - the fully assembled unit has the GPS module and he has used it with the mapping integration on the Things Network to display the unit's location.
Measure RSSI in the proximity of his house - units have good operational margin on his property.

Goals Not Achieved:

Determine the effective LoRa range of he gateway/sensor setup - he needed to find the time to get some data walking the GPS unit away from the gateway. hHe should be able to correlate the RSSI data associated with the GPS data packets and use -120 dBm as a range metric (or he could guess the real metric is when packets are not received - use the last location received). His accuracy may not be that good if he doesn't do some averaging. He's noticed that over time he could get geolocation outliers of 50-60 meters even though the clustering is more like 5-10 meters (with the unit in a static location).
Measure/optimize battery life - He sort of gave up on this one when he realized that he has older MKR Wan 1300 boards that do not power down the Murata LoRa module in sleep mode (fmilburn pointed out this issue). The achievable sleep mode current is ~2 mA. He's seen implementations of full power shutdown using the TI TPL5110 ultra low power timer. He thinks he will give that a try. He can make room on the proto board to handle that. And he'll need to make sure that the GPS handles save and restore of the tracking data correctly. His guess is that even with the newer MKR Wan 1300 (released the end of 2018) he would still have had to power down the GPS since its power save mode draws ~11mA. He may need to look at other GPS units.
Determine the reliability of his system by analyzing uptime - this is difficult to quantify in the prototype stage since he's been constantly power cycling the units. He noticed that his gateway reboots at least once daily. He probably needs to automate some processing on the Things Network console.

LoRa Experimental Environmental Sensors (LoRaXes)

Product Name	Manufacturer	Quantity
Arduino MKR WAN 1300	Arduino	1	Buy NowBuy Now
Network Gateway, The Things Network, LoRaWAN	Arduino	1	Buy NowBuy Now

Product Name
3.5dBi omni-directional antenna w/cable
3V battery pack w/2 AA batteries
Plastic case w/cover, 9.6 x 5.6 x 2.1 cm
Module NEO6MV2 with Flight Control EEPROM MWC APM2.5 large antenna
BME280.Temperature Sensor
PCB

Big Petro Maker Magic: $100 Datalogger That Can Save Millions by Sean_Miller:

This is a great project that demonstrates how you can solve a real world problem, for a $100 and some engineering know how. The Philadelphia Oil Refinery Explosion, was responsible for the shut down the largest and oldest oil refinery on the East Coast, and was a massive blow to the local economy. This event was the inspiration behind Sean_Miller 's Remote Monitoring & Control project, Big Petro Maker Magic: $100 Datalogger That Can Save Millions. It idea for The Fixed Equipment Vitals Megalogger was to have 24 sensors logging data every one minute and run without mains power or human intervention for 7 days with no wires. By taking Rosemount 648 Wireless Transmitters used for normal internal process condition monitoring, one can measure the fixed equipment vital conditions: Surface Temperature, Strain, Vibration, and Thickness. The Wireless versions of the Rosemount Wireless Transmitters make a great solution for temporary, freaky, intense, fixed equipment monitoring. Normally, control systems monitor what is in the pipes and vessels - not the assets themselves (with the exception of large furnace tubes and rotating equipment).

Big Petro Maker Magic: $100 Datalogger That Can Save Millions

"I really liked this project. Sean explained it really well, and showed his steps of how he developed his project, and all code is published. The end product looks usable too." - Community Member Judge

"Sean did a great job of detailing this project and providing a solution to a real world issue in an innovative way. The end result is a very cost effective way to improve the safety and monitoring of pressurised systems." - Community Member Judge

"Entertaining video. Always a pleasure to follow them along on their journey." - Community Member Judge

"The project is the grand prize winner. Some impacting aspects of the project IMHO match the most important aspects of the philosophy of Project 14: it's open source (very welcome), and it's really original for the topic, the field of application and for the idead in general. Then the project is well done very near to a on-field testing prototype than just a proof of concept demonstration. As a chemis I can appreciate the value of this project in the chemical production plants." - Community Member Judge

Product Name	Manufacturer	Quantity
Arduino Mega	Arduino	1	Buy NowBuy Now
LCD 2x 16, I2C	Midas	1	Buy NowBuy Now
Real Time Clock	Maxim	1	Buy NowBuy Now

Product Name
W5100 SD/Ethernet Shield
Rosemount 648 wireless transmitters
Autodesk Fusion 360
3D Printed Parts

Smarthab: Remote Sensing & Control by phoenixcomm:

From the start, phoenixcomm designed Smarthab with connectivity. Smarthab uses several forms of connectivity: Bluetooth, Zigbee,e WiFi, RFID, and Internet.

And here is what they do:

Zigbee - Interconnection of low-power devices in a mesh network such as my thermostat or air quality management system.
Bluetooth - Interconnection of devices that work in a higher power band, such as keyboards, room fobs (controller). to be designed
RFID - Passive devices, 20cm for fobs and badges, etc.
WiFi - Connects my cars to my house for updating Music, Phone Numbers, etc. This also lets Tablets, and Laptops on my network, via a RADIUS, Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service.
Internet - Connects to the world wide web, via an OpenBSD Firewall. This firewall only connects via three cables two only with MAC address (Data-In and Data-Out). In this way, nothing looks like it's there ie. just a piece of wire. The third is normally on the motherboard and is used for back-end control.

She'll describe how her Smarthab monitoring and control will be accomplished.

Smarthab: Remote Sensing & Control

CatDogFoxBot by dubbie:

dubbie has been blessed (or plagued) by wandering cats and the occasional fox in his back garden, so he decided to make something that would detect how often a cat (or other small animal) actually passes by. Having interest in the GridEye thermal array sensor he wanted to see if he could use a GridEye to detect these cats. The Grideye module was much smaller than he was expecting, although not a problem. For this project, he will also be using one of the step motors that he used in HoloPiBot #10 : It Actually Works - It Really Does! Having created a nice 3D printer holder for my DC motor mobile robot ( DCMotorsMobileRoBot #4 : 3D Printed PCB Holder, he decided to try and do the same for this project and he will be using another connectorless Nano. Having collected together all the parts needed to get started he sits down for a couple of hours using TinkerCAD to design some 3D printed parts to hold everything together. He's made the platform to hold the stepper motor and a widget to connect the Grideye PCB to the spindle of the stepper motor. For the initial design he used the parts in combination with some metal pillars a compact and a tidy module was produced. He demonstrates scanning the Grideye sensor backwards and forwards through 180 degrees. He makes the I2C connections between the GridEye sensor and the Arduino Nano. The specific GridEye sensor that he purchased did not seem to have any accompanying documentation, although it was claimed there was some on the supplier’s website but he could not find it. So, he decided that as it was a breakout board that most simple GridEye breakout boards would be pretty much the same so he used the Adafruit documentation and library. There was one problem in that the GridEye is a 3.3V device but the PCB he has just says Vin. After a close look at the PCB there does seem to be a voltage regulator so assuming they would have put 3V instead of Vin if there wasn't a regulator he connected it to the 5V supply from the Nano. The other I2C connections were straight forward.

CatDogFoxBot

"A nice study of how to not just collect data, but how to try to pull out useful information from it, to determine the presence of animals. It was a challenging project, and dubbie has done a lot of work to get this far. Very interesting to read." - Community Member Judge

"Micro Monster, great project, well described with support material." - Community Member Judge

"This was a very well explained project over a comprehensive set of blogs. The project implemented a fully functional solution but also with some options for future improvements." - Community Member Judge