Estimation Of Water Usage
By: Santhosh Bandaru
Tags: Sensors, App Development, Internet of Things, Technology, Arduino

Estimation Of Water Usage

If you are an excited geek and want to measure water usage, here is an interesting application for you. In this approach, we are going to work on different modules that will measure the water used by us. Let’s get to understand how you can measure and get displayed on mobile. Installing modules on our own will quite interesting.

from shutterstock.com

Hall Effect Water Sensor:

The Hall effect sensor sits in line with your water line and contains a pinwheel sensor to measure how much liquid has moved through it. It consists of an integrated magnetic hall effect sensor that outputs an electrical pulse with every revolution. It allows the sensor to stay safe and dry by sealing it from the water pipe. By counting the generated pulses from the output of the sensor, you can easily calculate water flow. It is not a precision sensor, and the pulse rate does vary a bit depending on the flow rate, fluid pressure, and sensor orientation. It will need careful calibration if better than 10% precision is required. The pulse signal is a simple square wave, and quite easy to convert into liters per minute using the following formula. Pulse frequency (Hz) / 7.5 = flow rate in L/min.

Arduino:

Arduino is an open-source platform used for building electronics projects on our own. It consists of both a physical programmable circuit board and IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that runs on a PC, used to write, debug and upload computer code to the physical board. Unlike most previous programmable circuit boards, it does not need a separate piece of hardware to dump new code onto the board. We can use a USB cable for dumping. Additionally, the Arduino IDE uses a simplified version of C++, which makes it easier to learn and write the program.

Here we are using Arduino-Uno. It consists of 14 digital pins and six analog pins. Each of which provides a resolution of 10bit that results in 1024 different values. These pins can measure from 0 to 5V.

HC-06:

It is a Bluetooth module designed for establishing a short-range transparent wireless communication between two modules. It works on Bluetooth 2.0 communication protocol. It can only act as a slave device. It is the cheapest device for wireless data transmission and more flexible compared to other methods, and it even can transmit files at speed up to 2.1Mb/s.

It uses FHSS(Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Technique) to avoid interference with other modules and to have full-duplex transmission. It works on the frequency range from 2.402 GHz to 2.480GHz.

MIT App Inventor

The MIT App Inventor is a web application, a visual programming environment that allows everyone to build fully functional apps for Android mobiles. We can make our apps and connect them with your modules. We can send and receive data from the module.

Implementation:

For this implementation, we need Arduino, HC06 Bluetooth module, Hall effect water sensor, connecting wires. Initially, install Arduino-Uno on your PC or laptop, and make sure you install the required drivers.

Using the MIT app inventor, make your app here. For more details, you can refer to the MIT app inventor in the above link. You can develop your app without knowing any coding. Even you can download (APK) file here.

Connections:

photo from author

Connect the circuit shown in the above picture and make sure all connections are proper. Dump the below code to the Arduino using the connector. After dumping the code into the microcontroller, you observe HC06 starts blinking the LED. When you get connected, you will find that HC06 stops blinking. Here attach your water pipe to the Hall effect sensor and power the Arduino with a DC power supply that is using an adaptor.

While Dumping the code, make sure to remove the RX and TX wires.

You have to connect to HC06 manually.

Passwords for HC06/ HC05 usually 0000 or 1234.

You can check out the whole project on Github

Conclusion:

Sit back and relax, now you can easily monitor your water usage. I hope you learned and enjoyed it. Please feel free to suggest any changes wherever you find a scope of improvement. I will catch up with you again soon. Till then, Stay Home and Stay Safe!

If you would like to get in touch, connect with me on LinkedIn.