Radio Flood Detector

It can be dangerous for your home or if you live in a flat even for your neighbors if you have a leak in your kitchen or bathroom. The water can do some serious damage to the walls, electric devices and so on.

For you to be safe there is this solution, it is not anything complicated, you will need just one simple device that you will place next to the washing machine or anything that can have a water leak and you will get a notification if anything goes wrong. You can then take some actions to prevent more damage.

1. Build hardware

You will receive all hardware that is needed in one package if you order the Flood Detector Kit. It can be tricky to put it all together. You can watch the video below for the complete guide

If you already inserted the device inside the enclosure, pull it out again. We will need to access the USB port in the next step :).

2. Flash firmware

• Download HARDWARIO Playground.
• If you bought the FloodMonitor Kit you will receive the Core Module with the firmware on it.
• Otherwise you can see documentation page on how to flash the firmware with HARDWARIO Playground.
• You will need the bcf-radio-flood-detector firmware for this project.

• After all this is done, you just have to wait for a moment and let the firmware to be flashed to the Core Module.

3. Pair the Core Module

You need to pair the Core module with the radio dongle that you are using, follow the instructions below to see how it is done.

The same thing will go if you are using a Raspberry pi as a server, just access the Raspberry through the IP address instead of the Playground

• Connect your USB Radio Dongle to your computer.
• Open HARDWARIO Playground

• Click Start Pairing the LED on the dongle should start blinking
• Connect the device that you want to pair into your computer or insert the batteries.
• Wait for the device to appear in the table
• It should add the device with the Alias: flood-detector:0
• Click Stop Pairing

After all this you can finally put the device into the enclosure all the steps below will be just on the computer and will not require to have the device connected to the PC.

4. Import Node-RED flow

Open Node-RED in the Playground or Raspberry Pi and import the flow from the Attachements. In the Menu -> Import -> Clipboard. Do not forget to hit "Deploy" in the top right corner to apply the changes.

There is nothing really special about the flow, you can of course expand it, start alarm when the flood is detected, send an email, etc. It is simple to work with the Node-RED flow.

You can change the message that will appear at the notification in the Alarm checker function.

5. Blynk integration

This project is ready for Blynk integration. How to set up Blynk with your HARDWARIO Playground is described in this guide.

Follow the guide if you want to make your own blynk app. If you want to use the one specified for this project in the Blynk app click this Icon and scan the QR code bellow.

Basically this app can send you a notification when there is a leak detected. So you will know it whenever you are in the moment it happens not when it is too late.

You can add more Widgets into the app, you can measure temperature with the firmware that you have on the Core Module for instance.

Summary

Thanks to this project you will never have to worry again that you will get home and there will be water anywhere because of the faulty tube or because you left the water running by accident.

It can save you a lot of money at it will not drain your electricity because it can run up to two years just on 2 Alkaline batteries.

Feel free to ask any questions about this project.

• Visit HARDWARIO page on hackster.io for more interesting projects or go directly to their website
• Go to HARDWARIO documentation to learn more about their modules and other possibilities of the platform.
• Try more firmware from HARDWARIO Playground or write your own, it is easy to start.
• Because everything is Open source you can get all firmware on GitHub, get some inspiration and try to make your own applications.
• Get your own HARDWARIO Hub to replace your computer in this project so you have always access to your applications.
• Check out more applications that can be used with HARDWARIO IoT Kit in Integrations section.