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.