UnifiedWater

https://www.ted.com/talks/sonaar_luthra_we_need_to_track_the_world_s_water_like_we_track_the_weather/transcript?language=en

Hello everyone,

I walk a lot to and from school and while I do so, I like losing myself in a podcast. Yesterday I was listening to TED talks daily on Spotify and to my surprise a TED talk directly related to the problem WaterAid aims to fix popped up.

It talks about how water data should be collected and analysed the same way weather data is. It talks about the importance of data collection and analysis delving into some specifics. But it also talks about challenges faced in ambient water quality monitoring.

Sonaar, the speaker, talks about how, many countries are only collecting water flow data as opposed to checking for impurities, pH, turbidity, etc. and how collecting this data alone is simply irrelevant in today's world, as well as the high expenses associated with quality data collection.

I think the talk truly is an eye opener and I personally found it very interesting.

Yay! It is 7:30 the next day. Took me a long while but I like my projects to tell a story and that takes time (and the compiler on Premiere Pro was fried for some reason and I had to export the video around 5 times). But I got everything done before the deadline, that's important.

I guess this will be my last log for now, I'm going to sleep. Bye.

A very stressful photoshoot because of the weather. Some things I guess can't be controlled. I had to mess with the lighting and colour in photoshop to make the photos look lively (because it was lashing rain and foggy).

I just finished creating the mockups for the dashboard of the project! I also updated my profile so you can know more about me!

Yesterday I was tinkering with some components I bought a while ago and came across the Seeed Solar charger shield (or something like that). The shield connects to a solar panel and a LiPo battery - charging the battery with solar power and in turn powering the device. I got it connected to the MKR GSM to provide power to the device and it works perfectly! Now the project is more sustainable and can survive for as long as needed in the field without the need to recharge.

Yes, the third log in a row, apologies again for this, but I did finish both the code and dashboard in the same day. So I used IoT central for the backend because it is so simple to set up while providing a reliable and industry grade experience, my personal favorite.

Before I used to stream the data from IoT Hub into a DB and then into MS PowerBi, but the streaming would cause a lag (as PowerBi works on fetch). IoT Central visualizes the data as it is received allowing real time applications to be built. The water pH, temperatures, humidity and turbidity are collected and visualized live.

The dashboard also allows the supervisor to edit settings such as the number of samples collected by the device as well as the intervals of time between data sends, sensor data collection and other features. Battery life is also visible!

Finished coding the project today. I published it on GitHub but it's private at the moment, have to add the readMe and license (after I start writing the article for the project). I used the Arduino vs code extension to get the code done, it enables intellisense for c++ and honestly, it is such a pleasure to code as opposed to the Arduino IDE. It took me about 6 days to finish (something like 4 hours a day).

Hi everyone!

Sorry for writing late again (I should have posted this last week, but as I am new to Hackaday I completely forgot about the logs feature). I found out I got to the finals of the Hackaday Prize! I planned out remaking the project fully, I am rewriting the entire code, redoing the enclosure and further documenting the project. I will also be using Azure IoT Central as the backend for higher security and enterprise grade services.

Stay tuned! I should publish the project by Sunday the 4th.

The project was initially published on Hackster a while ago. I got contacted not too long ago by a Hackaday representative telling me about the Hackaday impact prize. It sounded very exciting so I decided to refactor the project a bit and publish it on Hackaday!

So I used a dashboard very similar to the final one when I went out to collect some data. In the final version, I added the email alerts so that if the pH or turbidity of a reading is abnormal, an email will be sent alerting this.