Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
41 Water Contamination Detection and Alerting System for a Boat
Junik Kim
Nelson Lao
Samuel Hung
 David Null design_document1.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
presentation1.pptx
proposal1.pdf
Team Members: Nelson Lao (nlao2), Junik Kim (jkim664), Samuel Hung (shung5)

Title: Water Contamination Detection and Alerting System for a Boat

Problem: This project was a pitch from the Center of Environment Restoration and Sustainable Energy. The three main functions are Data Collection & GPS, Data Transfer, and Alarm.

In order to document water contamination, it requires a human manually boating to the affected area, and taking notes. The drawbacks to this method include safety concerns, less efficiency, and timeliness.

Our solution: Build a system that can remotely monitor water quality and contamination on a boat. This system will be able to automatically log data at distance intervals, determine if water is contaminated, and if it is, send a text message alert with GPS location coordinates, and sensor data. The data will be stored on an SD card and can be transferred wirelessly to a mobile device to upload to a Cloud server upon docking the boat.

Control Subsystem:
- Atmega 2560 microcontroller for interfacing with sensors, SD card, GPS module, bluetooth module. Could switch to other microcontrollers or FPGA if more inputs/outputs are needed.
- Calculates distances and logs water sensor measurements at distance intervals w/ location information onto an SDcard.
- Determines if water contamination is detected.
- Takes picture of site of contamination (optional)

Sensor Subsystem:
- Factors we want to get data on: Water hardness, pollution levels, chemical leakage in rivers.
- Main water quality sensors: pH, dissolved oxygen, water temperature, conductivity (salinity)
- Additional sensors we could incorporate: turbidity, Calcium (Ca+)/ Magnesium (Mg2+) concentrations, nitrates.
- Extra feature: Camera for image capture (optional)

Processing and Communications Subsystem:
- Bluetooth is used to connect to our system in order to transfer logged data from SDcard onto smartphone app for upload to server when boat is docked.
- Cellular GSM is used for sending an SMS text alert with GPS location data if contamination detected.

Power Subsystem:
- Our system will be powered off the boat’s 12V battery. This requires a 12V-5V voltage regulator in order to power our system and sensors.

Criterion for success:
- System is able to log water quality measurements.
- System is able to easily add on to a boat.
- System is able to send a text message alert when water contamination is detected.
- Optional: taking image using camera of contamination site.

Existing solutions on market:
- Libelium Smart Water wireless platform uses Cellular (3G, GPRS, WCDMA) to send data to Cloud but does not provide a text messaging instant alert like the system we proposed. It also does not take an image of the contamination site is best for monitoring a specific site, not for monitoring changing/multiple sites which our proposed system does with GPS location.

Update:
We have contacted CERSE and are waiting for their feedback on our proposal.

Smart Frisbee

Ryan Moser, Blake Yerkes, James Younce

Smart Frisbee

Featured Project

The idea of this project would be to improve upon the 395 project ‘Smart Frisbee’ done by a group that included James Younce. The improvements would be to create a wristband with low power / short range RF capabilities that would be able to transmit a user ID to the frisbee, allowing the frisbee to know what player is holding it. Furthermore, the PCB from the 395 course would be used as a point of reference, but significantly redesigned in order to introduce the transceiver, a high accuracy GPS module, and any other parts that could be modified to decrease power consumption. The frisbee’s current sensors are a GPS module, and an MPU 6050, which houses an accelerometer and gyroscope.

The software of the system on the frisbee would be redesigned and optimized to record various statistics as well as improve gameplay tracking features for teams and individual players. These statistics could be player specific events such as the number of throws, number of catches, longest throw, fastest throw, most goals, etc.

The new hardware would improve the frisbee’s ability to properly moderate gameplay and improve “housekeeping”, such as ensuring that an interception by the other team in the end zone would not be counted as a score. Further improvements would be seen on the software side, as the frisbee in it’s current iteration will score as long as the frisbee was thrown over the endzone, and the only way to eliminate false goals is to press a button within a 10 second window after the goal.