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I am not a smart person, but I do like performing a bit of science

cstanton

It's too warm in the United Kingdom, so I figured I'd invest in a fan/humidifier combo. 

image

The downside to this hardware, is that it will burn itself out. There's nothing detecting when the water reservoir doesn't have water in it. It's convenient enough, 3 modes to the fan, 3 levels of humidifier, battery, and USB rechargeable. 

So I figured, why not try to detect how much water is left in it with the hardware I have available? I couldn't wait for looking up too much detail or ordering parts from an online store.

I've no idea what I'm doing, so I figured, let's stick a couple of paperclips in there and connect it to an arduino uno.

image

So I read a bunch of values, do some buffering with an array, average them out. I get a very rough sine wave into the analog pin.

And then I notice the pattern, the water's low, the values are higher, the water's high, the values are lower. Setup some ranges, great.

Then I realise what I'm measuring when I turn off the humidifier, the paperclips are picking up the electrical noise from the humidifiers in the water

image


Not quite how I expected to measure if there's water left, but it appears if it's working harder, it's easier to pick up the noise, water isn't the best electrical conductor after all.

Still, I'm sure I should find a better method, but it is a small reservoir, I considered 3D printing something to be able to screw a bottle in to expand it a bit more though.

What do you think?

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  • Hi ..

    As we say in Boston Massachusetts USA, your "Wicked Smart" and your "Wicked PISSA" tooJoy....  Seriously I would have never thought of that.  

    I found an easier way to measure water level by using a groove water sensor and a Arduino MKR WAN 1300

    I used the sensor for a design challenge I did here on the community a few months back.image

    The part is

    • Grove - Water Sensor   SKU 101020018 
    • I purchased mine from MOUSER for $2.13 (USD)image
      • Grove - Water Sensor detects the presence of water using exposed PCB traces.
      • The sensor is made up of interlaced traces of Ground and Sensor signals.
      • The sensor traces are weakly pulled up using 1 MΩ resistor.
      • The resistor will pull the sensor trace value high until a drop of water shorts the sensor trace to the ground trace

    You can use the  sensor, the opposite way I did. you can test the sensor to detect no water dry = 1. Hopefully, it will sense the dryness before the unit burns itself out !!!  It does use a groove connector but you should be able to connect a jumpier from one end of the groove connector to the digital pins on the Uno. You then can do a DigitalRead() to check the value as I did

    the CODE is  in MKR_LoRa_Sender_E2.ino Which you can view in my comment under my blog in the Design challenge series at BLOG#5 Testing Part 2 Test#2

    Here a snippet where I check if there is water.

    //GET THE WATER DETECT VALUE  WET/DRY 0/1
String GetWaterStatus(){
  String stat;
  int val;
  val = digitalRead(WATER_SENSOR);
  
  if (val == 0){
    stat = "WET";
  }
  if (val == 1){
    stat = "DRY";
  }
//  if ((val != 0) || (val != 1) ){
//    stat = "Water Sensor ERROR";
//  }  
  return stat;
}

    Good Luck with your Fan/humidifier.
    Cheers
    Steve K
     
Reply

  • Hi ..

    As we say in Boston Massachusetts USA, your "Wicked Smart" and your "Wicked PISSA" tooJoy....  Seriously I would have never thought of that.  

    I found an easier way to measure water level by using a groove water sensor and a Arduino MKR WAN 1300

    I used the sensor for a design challenge I did here on the community a few months back.image

    The part is

    • Grove - Water Sensor   SKU 101020018 
    • I purchased mine from MOUSER for $2.13 (USD)image
      • Grove - Water Sensor detects the presence of water using exposed PCB traces.
      • The sensor is made up of interlaced traces of Ground and Sensor signals.
      • The sensor traces are weakly pulled up using 1 MΩ resistor.
      • The resistor will pull the sensor trace value high until a drop of water shorts the sensor trace to the ground trace

    You can use the  sensor, the opposite way I did. you can test the sensor to detect no water dry = 1. Hopefully, it will sense the dryness before the unit burns itself out !!!  It does use a groove connector but you should be able to connect a jumpier from one end of the groove connector to the digital pins on the Uno. You then can do a DigitalRead() to check the value as I did

    the CODE is  in MKR_LoRa_Sender_E2.ino Which you can view in my comment under my blog in the Design challenge series at BLOG#5 Testing Part 2 Test#2

    Here a snippet where I check if there is water.

    //GET THE WATER DETECT VALUE  WET/DRY 0/1
String GetWaterStatus(){
  String stat;
  int val;
  val = digitalRead(WATER_SENSOR);
  
  if (val == 0){
    stat = "WET";
  }
  if (val == 1){
    stat = "DRY";
  }
//  if ((val != 0) || (val != 1) ){
//    stat = "Water Sensor ERROR";
//  }  
  return stat;
}

    Good Luck with your Fan/humidifier.
    Cheers
    Steve K
     
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