Water treatment station monitoring and automation

Community Help With My Project
1

Hello All,

i am new here. I have a background in systems and electronics from school, but long time since i write code or fiddle around with hardware…

I have a project that i would like to work on and have no idea on how i can do it.

I need to control via wifi a water refilling station and a laundry shop which i own in the Philippines.

I basically need to be able to measure water level in 2000L tanks, operate pumps through APC, open and close valves, measure and record water flow.

I need to be able to have a system synoptic drawn on a computer screen where i can see the status of my system in real time, and i have seen how easy it is to implement with Cayenne…

The further step would be to write the code that automates the switching of pumps and valves based on sensor data.

Can i do this with Arduino and Wifi module ? I read that Cayenne is not compatible with the Arduino with WIFI version… has this been corrected ?
Can i program my Arduino and Cayenne remotely via wifi even if they are installed remotely ?

Which sensor can i use for water level, water flow, water pressure, and which valves i can use to be controlled by arduino ? I have seen that in Cayenne its possible to import own sensors, cause i have some existing water level sensors that read a current and i have no idea on which datasheet i have to provide to Cayenne in order to make system integration…

Sorry for the many questions but i have no idea where to start, and i see the many basic quick start guides do not help me much.
I would need to know where to find the material to study so i can understand if i can do this thing.

Hope to get some clue on where and what to start to study in order to make this happen in particular of which kind of version of Arduino i need to get started…

Thanks all,
Pietro.

2

Cayenne is compatible with Arduino uno and ESP wifi. it is just that we dont recommend it as there is only one hardware serial port unlike arduino mega. you can connect a wifi shield to the arduino uno.
Your project sounds interesting and completely doable with cayenne.
First of all you will have to get all the sensors and actuator you need for your project. Once done get it working with your arduino without using cayenne. If you get the required reading from the sensor, then it is very easy to send receive data from cayenne. This can be done by just one line:

Cayenne.virtualWrite(channel_number, sensor_data, "type value", "unit value");

for the supported data types have a look at this Data types for Cayenne MQTT API

For waterproof water level sensor : Help with hr-sr04 and jsn-sr04t - #7 by dpineda.psi

3

can you please elaborate on this ?
I do not understand, is it you dont recomend Arduino and i should be using Raspberry ? In that case i was actually reading about Raspberry and it looks like i would need to have some extra hardware since most of the sensors i will be using would be analog.

I basically need to measure water level, water flow, water pressure, based on those reading i am building my logic of pump actuation and valve switching…

I have seen there are quite a bit of different wifi modules for Arduino, and indeed in would need more info on what it is actually supported by Cayenne, in order to be sure it will work.

Thanks a lot for your reply !

4

on arduino uno there is only one hardware serial port (pin 0 and 1) while arduino mega has 4 ports. the cayenne sketch for esp as shield use serial port for communication. thus arduino uno having only one which is used while uploading and also for debug, it is not suitable and stable to use it with arduino uno. the sketch works perfect with arduino mega.

you don’t need a raspberry pi, you only need to change Arduino Uno to mega. Or use any other esp development board like wemos, nodemcu or adafruit huzzah.

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