Monthly Archives: June 2016
Smart community update
Couple of weeks back, we were asked to monitor the water level in the common tank in Pruksa (a residential community in East Bangalore with around 400 houses). This is also the location of our smart community test bed.
The common water tank is around 15 meters high and it supplies water to all the houses. The water level should not be too high (too much pressure can break pipes, valves etc). The tank gets it’s water from an underground tank. Couple of pumps are used for this purpose. The person in charge of water supply needs to be aware of the water level at all times so that he can switch on the pumps when the water level is low and switch off the pumps when the water level is too high. The next step will be to automate this whole process.
We installed a wireless water level sensor comprising an industrial pressure sensor interfaced to a WiSense WSN1101L wireless sensor node. This node is part of the community wide wireless sensor network in Pruksa. The network operates in the license free 865-867 MHz band and operates at 1.2 kbps.
The node is mains powered with Li-Ion battery back up to handle frequent power cuts. A weather-proof ABS enclosure protects the WSN1101L, the Li-Ion battery and associated electronics.
The node has been running well for over two weeks now. We are sending the sensor data to our cloud platform “WiSight”.
I have included some pics of the installation below.
Here is a snapshot of water level data (over the last two days) from WiSight.
Tank/Sensor node location wrt the WiSense LPWMN Coordinator + Gateway. The sensor node is 2 hops from the WiSense Coordinator node. The latter is connected to a Raspberry PI which collects data received from the network and forwards it to WiSight running on AWS.
For more information on WiSense, please visit wisense.in.