Project
| # | Title | Team Members | TA | Documents | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18 | Remote Monitoring System for Water Pumps |
Masaki Sato Raynaldi Iskandar Yun Mo Kang |
Dean Biskup | design_document1.pdf final_paper1.pdf other1.pdf presentation1.pptx proposal1.pdf |
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| Team members: In-Person: Raynaldi Yose Iskandar (ri3), Masaki (masakis2) Online: Yun Mo Kang (ykang19) #PROBLEM In Indonesia, extremely remote, many rural villages are located very far from clean water sources, such that villagers have to walk by foot in a three-hour round trip just to get their clean water daily. The country's infrastructure system is not developed enough to support these villages, but a student-based organization that one of our member is a part of, called Solar Chapter, have resolved this issue by building a system that pumps clean water from its source to villages in the vicinity, allowing villagers to have easier access to clean water. Further problems arose in terms of sustaining the water pumps that run the system. Any sort of downtime can have adverse effects on the villagers' life, so maintaining the system through water pump inspection and maintenance is crucial. However, in this situation even having regular inspection is troublesome due to the remote location being far even from residential areas, not to mention the limited knowledge the villagers have to handle the pumps. #SOLUTION Our team is proposing a solution in the form of a remote monitoring system for these water pumps. The system takes the pump's basic operating data such as water flow and up-time measurement to monitor the pump's behavioral trend, as well as regularly measures safety parameters including vibration, temperature, and current/voltage. The system would send an alert when measured values show undesired results to let the operating personnel know that something is wrong with the pump and maintenance should be conducted shortly. Performing these precautions can extend the longevity of these devices and prevent the pumps from breaking down unexpectedly. This would prevent any sort of downtime and greatly improve the sustainability of the water system. The values measured from the sensors would then be transmitted remotely through a cellular network to a cloud-based database system, which then will be visualized through a website or an app for an operating personnel to look at anytime and anywhere. This system minimizes the need of physical on-site personnel presence, and minimizes it to only emergency maintenance and longer-term physical inspections while still keeping the water system rather foolproof. #COMPONENTS ##POWER Since the pumps erected by Solar Chapter are solar-powered, the system can utilize this power source and use rechargeable Lithium Ion batteries for its power. An important aspect of a solar-powered rechargeable battery is that it can self-sustain in such a remote place with minimum personnel presence, ensuring that the system will always have sufficient power. ##SENSORS The main sensors would be the ones that measure the pump’s operational parameters, a water flow sensor and an ammeter. The water flow sensor periodically takes in data when the pump is on, while ammeter indicates if the pump is on and runs a clock that measures up-time of how long the pump runs each day. In terms of safety, vibration and temperature sensors are used to monitor if any of those parameters’ value starts to shoot up, indicating that pump maintenance is required to prevent further extreme damage. Any faulty sensors can be detected by cross-referencing the sensor output signal with the state of the pump; For example, if the water flow sensor does not read any data while the pump is on, this would tell us that the water flow sensor is broken. If this event occurs, the pump will send an alert signal to conduct immediate maintenance. ##CELLULAR DATA TRANSMISSION Cellular modem or compact USB cellular modem. Sending data collected from sensors in a set interval; approximately every 15 minutes. ##DATABASE AWS Lambda to process incoming data and store it on AWS database. ##WEBSITE We will host a website on AWS S3 service as a static website and read csv on S3 bucket using ajax. Then using AWS Lambda, we will query data from the water pump and upload it as csv a file on S3 bucket in set interval. This approach works because there is no need for live database connection due to the set interval of data input, limited variation of queries needed, and limited volume of data needed for the website. It reduces backend development and infrastructure maintenance. #CRITERION FOR SUCCESS -The sensors must properly collect water pump data to analyze its status. -The system sends alert messages if the pump behaves abnormally (monitored by safety sensors) or sensors are considered broken. -The microcontroller must correctly process and send collected data through cellular networks. -AWS Lambda and AWS database must receive data steadily every 15 minutes, and update csv on AWS S3 bucket. -We must build a website that can visualize the water pump’s status for the convenience of the user. #CONTINGENCY PLAN For the hardware part, a personal soldering device and digital multimeter should be able to facilitate soldering the PCB and signal testing respectively, especially since we are dealing with small signals for the most part. Simulating each different sensor individually through mock environments then transmitting the data could be an alternative if quarantine prevents testing the system on water pumps. For the software part, if data transmission from hardware is no longer available, then we will feed mock data into the AWS Lambda using script. This would emulate hardware data inputs. |
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