“This project provides the ability to calculate and report the total litres of water within cylindrical water-tank/s
The drought that South Africa is facing an in particular the Western Cape has meant that many people have installed rain water tanks to their homes, to supplement their water supply. We (BIGBrave) wanted to do something to help! So using the learnings of our Beverage Insights product and the mad coding skills of one of our resident wizards (GuyDelta) we put together this awesome DIY IoT project with some easily sourced electronics and some free online tools, namely Adafruit IO and Arduino IDE.
Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 with an ultrasonic sensor to measure water tank volumes and connected to an MQTT feed.
1. Goal:
This project provides the ability to calculate and report the total litres of water within cylindrical water-tanks, more specifically rainwater tanks connected to a rainfall-gutter-collection system. Using the Adafruit Feather Huzzah ESP8266 and an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor communicating to an Adafruit IO dashboard via MQTT, this provides the ability to collect and monitor tank volume in real time in any web-browser on any device, as well as providing the ability to set notification triggers.
Based on the Adafruit MQTT Library ESP8266 Example written by Tony DiCola for Adafruit Industries and the Ultrasonic Sensor HC-SR04 and Arduino Tutorial written by Dejan Nedelkovski, www.HowToMechatronics.com
The following are component and tool lists that is used to build this project, however, the project is flexible enough to be utilized with many alternate configurations. If you are only interested in the setting-up of the ESP8266, installation of its code, and communication with the Adafruit IO dashboard, you can skip to step 2. Setup below.”