Welcome to EnviroDIY, a community for do-it-yourself environmental science and monitoring. EnviroDIY is part of WikiWatershed, a web toolkit designed to help citizens, conservation practitioners, municipal decision-makers, researchers, educators, and students advance knowledge and stewardship of fresh water. New to EnviroDIY? Start here

Reply To: Remote Water Quality System for Stream

Home Forums Infrastructure and Equipment Remote Water Quality System for Stream Reply To: Remote Water Quality System for Stream

#1246
neilh20
Participant

    Hey interesting thread here.
    Seems like a lot of people have some great ideas on this. My 2cents is its a really difficult area – specifically for what Rene has pointed out – the quiescent current.
    Unfortunately Arduino does not cultivate a low power paradigm – Arduino core has said dealing with low power event based software is too difficult, but PRJC.com is a step beyond the core.

    I’ve got a solution for stream monitoring that I’m working up –
    http://www.meetup.com/Nerds-For-Nature/photos/26131259/#437612397 which I talked about at this years San Mateo Maker’s faire – see the poster to the left of guy/me – “Wireless Stream Sensor Road Map”

    For anybody who is interested in a working on a Specific Conductance probe I created this as a starter.
    https://makerspace.com/projects/specific-conductance-probe
    The electrodes could be titanium – the challenge is how to plan to clean the electrodes of the ever prevalent slime build up.

    Some instruments have a wiper, but I haven’t figure out how to easly do this.
    Slime is often watershed dependent but a physical cleaning seems to be the most obvious solution.
    http://priede.bf.lu.lv/grozs/HidroBiologjijas/FieldGuideAquaticPhenomena.pdf
    http://www.gov.pe.ca/environment/whats-in-the-water

    I could produce some hardware using the Teensy-LC to aid in prototyping if anybody is interested.

    What is taking most of my time right now is a low-cost water depth probe, with a place holder here
    https://makerspace.com/projects/water-depth-sensor-gauge-wireless-solar-powered-for-remote-streams
    which can run by itself data collecting, or plug in to a low cost
    Wireless Sensor Network
    It uses a basic processor, Teensy-LC
    low power MKL26Z with LiFePO4 battery, solar charging and RS485/SDI12 –
    initially with a water depth measurements,
    and can fit into a 2″ PVC pipe for protection and sealing in a stream.
    There is a few places discussing this … so I’m wondering whats a good way of promoting the evolution of specifications for instruments.

    with plug’n’play – it will fit into a 3″ plastic pipe for easy protection, solar powered/LiFePo4 and based on a Kinetis Arm (similar to the Teensy3.1 but because of hardware port limitations actually another processor with 128Kram)

    So the challenges can be broken into smaller challenges – then they can be solved one-at-a-time.
    I wonder if anyone is trying the Teensy3.1/TeensyLC (with Freescale ARM M0 processors) ~ solidly Arduino in a workable footprint.
    See also
    https://forum.pjrc.com/threads/23660-Low-Power-quot-Green-quot-Battery-Operation-Solutions-For-The-Teensy-3
    http://publiclab.org/notes/donblair/08-25-2015/turbidity-001#c12460
    http://publiclab.org/notes/neilh20/07-22-2014/water-quality-instrumentation-quality-gottchas