Is there any information on the sensors themselves out of interest.
I'm curious if they use something like LoRa with CSS. Or FSK. Or some kind of cellular system.
GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
#22This is amazing! I've wanted to do some "citizen science" project in waterways around me. For instance, building cheap sensors that detect temperature/water level/salinity/particulates/etc that are so cheap as to be basically disposable. The sensor itself could probably be made for less than $10 these days using various arduino modules, but I'm stuck on how to have the sensors communicate back to a "base station" to…
I'm looking at something similar at the moment, but in agricultural areas where line-of-sight is inhibited only by foliage and terrain. For my purpose, it's OK to collect an SD card every so often, but I've toyed with the idea of an ESP8266 and a directional antenna to e.g. a mobile broadband router, probably again with an antenna upgrade. Earlier today, I found [1] which - amongst other things which you might be int…
I am a hydrographer in the NT working out in very remote areas- Phone reception is rarely possible for such monitoring sites. Currently we use satellite Comms. to relay water data home, but this is very expensive and prone to failure.
I'm wondering if you, or anyone else, has some ideas on long range communication strategies for large areas (NT is 1.4 million km2).
The area we are required to cover generally means sites are chosen based on accessibility rather than operational importance — it would be great if we could expand the network with low maintenance loggers capable of communicating long distances.
Re: GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
#23Just out of curiosity, what's the probability that Twitter would shut down these river gauge accounts because they're not people? Does Twitter have a history of leaving projects like this alone?
Twitter actually encourages / supports these types of accounts, as detailed here, where they describe a bot that responds to airfare requests and another one that shares information about school closures: https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915
Re: GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
#24This is amazing! I've wanted to do some "citizen science" project in waterways around me. For instance, building cheap sensors that detect temperature/water level/salinity/particulates/etc that are so cheap as to be basically disposable. The sensor itself could probably be made for less than $10 these days using various arduino modules, but I'm stuck on how to have the sensors communicate back to a "base station" to…
Sort of related, this website crowdsources finding and fixing polluted waterways: https://creeklife.com/
Re: GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm looking at something similar at the moment, but in agricultural areas where line-of-sight is inhibited only by foliage and terrain. For my purpose, it's OK to collect an SD card every so often, but I've toyed with the idea of an ESP8266 and a directional antenna to e.g. a mobile broadband router, probably again with an antenna upgrade. Earlier today, I found [1] which - amongst other things which you might be int…
I am a hydrographer in the NT working out in very remote areas- Phone reception is rarely possible for such monitoring sites. Currently we use satellite Comms. to relay water data home, but this is very expensive and prone to failure. I'm wondering if you, or anyone else, has some ideas on long range communication strategies for large areas (NT is 1.4 million km2). The area we are required to cover generally means si…
What update frequency is required?
Re: GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm looking at something similar at the moment, but in agricultural areas where line-of-sight is inhibited only by foliage and terrain. For my purpose, it's OK to collect an SD card every so often, but I've toyed with the idea of an ESP8266 and a directional antenna to e.g. a mobile broadband router, probably again with an antenna upgrade. Earlier today, I found [1] which - amongst other things which you might be int…
I am a hydrographer in the NT working out in very remote areas- Phone reception is rarely possible for such monitoring sites. Currently we use satellite Comms. to relay water data home, but this is very expensive and prone to failure. I'm wondering if you, or anyone else, has some ideas on long range communication strategies for large areas (NT is 1.4 million km2). The area we are required to cover generally means si…
Which operator are you using? We've found L-band to be very reliable and does not suffer from any of the attenuation issues found in Ku. And heavy spreading on the return path provides for an even more resilient link.
Disclosure: We'll be offering an L-band satellite gateway for IoT this summer.
Re: GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
#27This is amazing! I've wanted to do some "citizen science" project in waterways around me. For instance, building cheap sensors that detect temperature/water level/salinity/particulates/etc that are so cheap as to be basically disposable. The sensor itself could probably be made for less than $10 these days using various arduino modules, but I'm stuck on how to have the sensors communicate back to a "base station" to…
Search for "M2M" (machine to machine) communications. There's a lot of this going on over old 2-way paging networks. It's how the non-vaporware "Internet of things" works. There are thousands of air conditioning compressors, refrigeration units, elevators, pumping stations, and other boring but important pieces of infrastructure sending their short messages every few minutes. Often they're plain text, something like…
It's pretty amazing that AT&T charges that much per MB; that's close to market for satellite M2M. Of course, the terminals for cellular M2M are considerably less expensive.
Re: GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
#28FWIW, the US Geological Survey has an API (plus their own interactives and reports) for river flow http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt
Yup -- they even have configurable SMS & email alerts you can set up to let you know when the water level at a particular point goes below or above a specified depth: http://water.usgs.gov/waternow/
I use it to let me know when my local river is running deep enough to make for a fun day out on a kayak.
Re: GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
#29FWIW, the US Geological Survey has an API (plus their own interactives and reports) for river flow http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt
Re: GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a hydrographer in the NT working out in very remote areas- Phone reception is rarely possible for such monitoring sites. Currently we use satellite Comms. to relay water data home, but this is very expensive and prone to failure. I'm wondering if you, or anyone else, has some ideas on long range communication strategies for large areas (NT is 1.4 million km2). The area we are required to cover generally means si…
What update frequency is required?
It's heavily dependent on river/climate conditions. During the dry most loggers will only need to be polled once every hour. However, during the buildup and wet, the stations would ideally be sending back every ~5 minutes.