Conservancies' and wild parks remains as one of the last ecological natural habitats in the African Continent, that nourishes the diversity they host. These however is under threat not only by the dwindling water supplies through these habitats but, also by an unseen threat of water contamination, as the water never goes under any quality testing procedure unlike the human water, whose water is passed through water treatment facilities to remove the contaminant's some of which like heavy metal are detrimental to the health of an organism. Thus the inspiration to undertake these project as my contribution towards conservation.
The Challenge.
The challenge was to come up with an automated water quality system which provides the different water quality parameters in real time and that allows for remote assessment of state of the water quality for respective actions to be taken. Thus I set out to build an water quality testing alternative system that is simpler, less expensive, easy to deploy and has potential for scalability for deployment in river flows.
Set Up and Execution.
The project program was set up in Arduino ide and Configuration done, on the WIO terminal to update the chips firmware. These was followed by addition of the groove libraries to the Arduino IDE for compatibility and ease of operation. The programs were then loaded to the WIO terminal, which using the "thingspeak" server api, having connected to a WIFI network pushed the sensed data to the "thingspeak" website through a TCP connection for display and analysis. One of the benefit of using the Thingsnetwork is that this can help those tasked with quality monitoring to assess the state of water quality, even when they are not near the base station,
Challenges Encountered.
- Lack of Lora WAN gateway in my location, was hinderance to realizing the full scale of the project.
- The project did not include all the water quality parameters that are needed, for assuring water quality.
Future Plans.
- Am looking into finding access to a Lora WAN gateway and incorporating the Lora transmission to the network, to increase the capability of the project.
- In future versions, I will be incorporating vision AI module to bolster the data, from turbidity sensor node
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