Japan is a mountainous country with a lot of rainfall during the rainy season. In recent years, there have been many extreme weather events, and torrential rains have been observed in many cases.
In such an environment, landslides are becoming more and more common.
In Japan, where there are few plains, many residential areas have been built in mountainous regions, resulting in landslides that have claimed many victims.
Article on Japan's Major Landslide Disaster
OBJECTIVESLandslides often show the following signs before they occur
1. Cracks appear on the mountain surface or ground.
2. Steps form on the surface of the mountain or ground.
3. Water from streams and wells becomes stagnant.
4. Water gushes out from the slope or ground.
5. Buildings, utility poles, and trees lean.
Water levels in wells and field ponds change drastically.
Focusing on the first and second signs of a landslide, I will create a device that detects when a pile inserted into a slope tilts due to the occurrence of the signs and emits an alarm to encourage early evacuation.
REQUESTThis device can be placed in your own backyard and immediately alerts you to any approaching danger, prompting you to evacuate.
Since you never know where in the mountain a landslide may occur, it is necessary to install multiple devices.
In developing the device, we tried to satisfy the following conditions
1.Easy to make
The device must bable to be produced with a minimum of knowledge and tools, so that anyone who needs it can obtain it anywhere.
2.Inexpensive to produce.
Specialized and specialized parts should be kept to a minimum, and a large number of devices can be produced at low cost to ensure accuracy and redundancy.
3.Wireless operation
Wireless operation is required to reduce the cost of maintaining and managing a large number of devices and to ensure that alarms can be detected remotely and safely.
SOLUTION1. Easy to make
Crafting is kept to a minimum and combines readily available general-purpose devices.
2. Low cost
Because it is a combination of general-purpose devices, it is not as expensive as a specialized tool.
3. wireless operation
SPRESENSE is power-saving, so it can operate continuously for long periods of time on a solar-charged mobile battery. If the alarm is within visual range, the LED illumination will flash to alert the user. Although development was not completed in time for this project, a low-power-consumption communication module will be selected to add the ability to send alerts via wireless communication.
DESCRIPTIONTo solve these problems, I have created a device that catches the signs of a landslide and alerts the public.
This device can be produced very inexpensively and easily by using commercially available garden lights. The SPRESENSE and accelerometer are attached to a garden light in the shape of a stake, which is used by sticking it into a slope where a landslide is likely to occur. When a slight change or displacement of the slope occurs as a sign that a landslide is about to occur, the system detects the change in angle and alerts the user.
The garden lights are powered by a solar panel and battery, and although SPRESENSE is a very low-power device, we designed it to operate intermittently using the Deepsleep function to allow continuous use even with the small amount of power generated by the solar panel. SPRESENSE is a very low-power device.
The current specification is to flash the original LED light on the garden light as an alert, but I am considering the possibility of sending alerts to remote locations via wireless communication.
CIRCUITCreate a switch circuit to turn on the LED for the alart.
The required parts are as follows
・6x8 Stripboard... Cut to the required size and use.
・Transistor BC550 x 1
・Resistor 10Ω x 1
・Header pins 6Pins x 2
・Some cables
The board to light the LEDs for alerts is fabricated as follows.
Cut the stripboard to the size of 6x8 pins, where 8 pins matches the width of the Spresense main board.
Solder a 6-pin pin header; since the Spresense socket is shallow, solder the long side of the pin header and cut off the excess.
Place the resistors and transistors on the board and wire them together. The power supply should be shared with the acceleration board, so this should also be connected.
First, disassemble the garden light and modify the circuit.
Unscrewing the screws on the back of the solar panel provides access to the circuit boards for charge control and LED drive, as well as the Ni-MH battery.
Ideally, the system should be operated using only the power generated by the solar panels, but due to insufficient know-how in power saving, the system will be converted to a charged battery with a higher capacity to begin operation.
The capacity of the supplied battery is 200 mAh, but we are changing it to a 2400 mAh battery. If you only need to cover the amount of electricity generated by the solar panels, you do not need to replace the battery.
An IC called YX8055 is used to charge the battery while the solar panel is generating power, and to light the LED when power generation stops.
Disconnect the power supply cable to the LED and relocate it to the main power line.Power is supplied to the SPRESENSE through this cable.
Next, the lighting Module is modified. Then modify the lighting section. The lighting section can be disassembled by rotating the hood.
The LEDs will be diassembled for later use.
The cover glass will be changed to red as an alert. An appropriate filter would be good, but in this case we used a red marker to add color.
The power line that was driving the LEDs is used to drive the SPRESENSE. Due to the low voltage, a step-up boost module HY-106 is used.
HY-106 can output 5V power from USB TYPE A connector.
The main board of SPRESENSE is equipped with an acceleration sensor board and a board for LED lighting, and is wired to LED lights.
The necessary processing has been completed up to this point, and the parts should be ready as shown in the photo.
Before starting the final assembly, let's check the operation of the program.
This program initializes the accelerometer at power-on and detects and records the device's tilt from the acceleration information.
After initialization, the device enters Deepsleep and restarts after a certain period of time. The difference between the measured device tilt and the initial tilt at the time of restart is calculated, and if the difference is greater than a threshold value, a warning is issued.
In addition, the CPU clock is kept at 8 MHz to reduce power consumption.
The following video shows how the built-in LED lights up according to the amount of change in tilt after Deepsleep. For testing purposes, the Deepsleep time is set to 1 second.
Zero LEDs are lit when the change in tilt is 2° or less, one LED when the change is 4° or less, two LEDs when the change is 6° or less, three LEDs when the change is 8° or less, and four LEDs when the change is 10° or less.
If the angle exceeds 10°, the LEDs on the garden lights flash as an alert. Once alerted, the flashing is maintained until reset.
ASSEMBLE 2Connect HY-106 and SPRESENSE with USB TypeC cable.
The SPRESENSE main board is secured inside the lighting module with hot melt adhesive.
The assembly is completed by fixing the LEDs in the reverse order of disassembly and attaching the cover glass and hood.
1. stick the stake of the device into the slope where there is a risk of collapse and fix it in place.
2. Cover the solar panel with your palm or something and turn on the main switch while it is not generating power.
Note: SPRESENSE will be activated if the solar panel is generating power even when the main switch is off. Since a restart is required to record the initial angle, it is necessary to completely turn off the power supply before starting SPRESENSE.
3. 2~3 seconds after startup, the angle is recorded as the initial state.
4. Each time the SPRESENSE is restarted from deep sleep, the angle is measured, and if the angle changes more than the threshold value, the LED flashes and an alert is issued.
Note: In the demo program, Deepsleep is 600 seconds and the threshold value is 10degree.
FIELD TESTTo test continuous operation, the device is set up in a sunny garden and actually operated for 600 sec.
Mainly for the test to check battery life, we leave the device as it is during the day and cover it at night so that it cannot be recharged. The next morning, we try tilting the device with the cover on to see if it alerts us.
It is working well as of the third day, although it is under good conditions due to the continuous sunny summer weather.
The video shows checking the alert when tilt is detected.
The first is the addition of wireless communication capability.
Wireless is necessary to ensure that alerts are received, but care must be taken in selecting a transmission method because it consumes more power.
We recently obtained a low-power Wi-Fi board and have begun adding functionality. However, since the communication distance is short, we plan to consider communication methods such as Wi-SUN and LoRaWAN.
The second point is to enhance the power supply.
The solar panels used in this project have very low output and are unstable. Therefore, we plan to modify the system to use mobile batteries so that it can be installed in mountainous areas where power generation is not possible.
This kind of warning system is an indispensable device to eliminate human casualties from landslides. There are similar systems developed by companies, but they are often expensive and cannot be deployed in large areas.
We believe that it is worthwhile to develop and promote DIY or simple systems to protect oneself.
Since there are still some parts of the system that are inadequate in terms of functionality, we plan to produce a new version with additional functions.
Comments