What is this witchcraft?
It's a flood monitoring and early-warning network based on data from wifi-enabled sensors.
Why?
Floods happen and people lose property to them. In some cases, it's possible to forecast their happening. That's our purpose here.
How?
We made two kinds of sensors (a flow sensor and a pressure sensor), a server to gather their data and push it into a nice front end & tweet warnings.
Sensors Both sensors (for this hackathon) are built on ESP8266 chips (µController + WiFi) and out of "garbage" we had lying around.
The flow sensor is a rotary encoder that counts each turn and sends this count out to the server every minute (effectively an RPM value). This is what would be used for the early warnings; a large enough amount of rain - dependent on time and intensity - means the amount of water flowing down to the area of interest. The turbine that drives the rotary encoder is a cut medicine cup mounted on a broken marker and a nail. This marker has a slot cut in it, which allows IR light to pass through to an IR photodiode hanging inside it and give the µcu a value each time the slot passes the IR LED on the outside. What holds everything together is a broken pair of sunglasses and the top half of a water bottle (of course, this is all for demo purposes, as the turbine would need to be in a drain pipe and made waterproof).
The depth sensor is simply a pressure sensor that would be mounted between a buoy and a clamp to the ground at the lowest point of the flood area (also needs to be made waterproof).
Back end Sensors send data to a nodejs + postgresql server running on Red Hat's Openshift service. The database stores historical data to later be used for learning and better predictions.
Front end Alarms are sent out via twitter ( https://twitter.com/ABFloodNet ) and data is presented in a jQuery interface with current water level on a Google map.
TL;DR
The main student parking lot in UPRM (University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez) floods with little warning when enough rain starts pouring over campus. We're working on a monitoring and early warning system to help students not lose belongings or have their cars damaged. Also, the system is designed to be scalable and easily portable to any location where floods are the norm.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.