Project Idea | Water Management System

Introduction: Water is one of the most important basic needs for living beings. But with the modernization and development of human lifestyles, consumption of water has been at the peak. The shortage of water has been thus increasing at a very rapid rate. States like Kerala and Chennai which had once ample of water is now running out of it. Wastage of water has been proven to be one of its major cause. Water overflow over an hour and careless draining of freshwater from residential, hospitals, and municipal tanks adds flavor to the shortage of drinking water.

It becomes quite hectic for the conventional tanks to fill up the water judiciously without any wastage of it or nearly impossible to keep a  check on it.

So thereby we switch to the i.o.t project to nearly solve the above-mentioned problems and keep a check on the overflowing of the tank and also keep an eye on the prevention of wastage of electricity on the excess working of the pumps.

Aim of Project: Automation in the pumping system for filling up the water tank. A sensor is placed on the top of the tank which constantly monitors the level of the water being supplied to the tank. As the water reaches the limiting level the water pump is automatically turned off. It also calculates the running time and the power consumed by the motor. The data is thereafter stored in the cloud. The data can be easily fetched to have budget estimation per month. It also notifies the weather conditions, if the weather is predicted to be bad the notification about filling up the tank would come which in response helps up in filling up the tank when there is a power supply.

Components Used:

• Node MCU: It is a firmware which consists of a WIFI module ESP-8266. It consists of 13 General  Purpose Input-output pins. The four pins from the sensors are connected to the four respective pins of node MCU.  The inbuilt WIFI module provides its room over other microcontrollers.
• Ultrasonic Sensor: It detects the presence of any obstacles by detecting through the sound waves. The following basically has 4 pins i.e. Ground, Echo, Trig, VCC. The two circular-shaped icons demonstrate transmission and receiving. In our project, the ultrasonic sensor basically judges the water level or measures the distance from the overflow pipe.
• D.C. Motor/Pump: It draws water with the help of the D.C power supply. The D.C supply provides a controlled suction and is best suited for performing projects.
• Relay: The relay basically helps in controlling the motor. We use the four-channel relay in this case. It consists of six pins IN1, IN2, IN3, IN4, VCC, and GND. The four channels out of which each contains three openings named NO, C, NC respectively.

Software Used:

• Adafruit: Adafruit.io is a cloud service. It’s meant primarily for storing and then retrieving data and it displays your data in real-time, online, makes project internet-connected: Control motors, read sensor data, and connect projects to web services like Twitter, RSS feeds, weather services, etc.
• Arduino IDE: Arduino Uno is a microcontroller board. It has 14 digital input/ output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz quartz crystal, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with an AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.
• IFTTT: If This Then That, also known as IFTTT. It helps you connect all of your different apps and devices. We can enable your apps and devices to work together to do specific things they couldn’t do otherwise.
• Blynk: Blynk is a platform that allows quickly build interfaces for controlling and monitoring your hardware projects from your iOS and Android device. We can create a project dashboard and arrange buttons, sliders, graphs, and other widgets onto the screen.

Methodology & Implementations:

• The follows I.O.T based project facility in saving water.
• Controlling water flow from the pipe of the water tank with the help of sensors fixed near tank.
• Budget estimation monthly through saving the time for which the pump was active in a day and sequentially for months.
• A sensor fixed judges the water level rising to the beam of the tank and instantaneously turns off the pump being full. Groundwater is being saved from being wasted.
• Cost effective and budget savior as prevention of extra working of the pump.

Diagram:

BLOCK DIAGRAM

Water Level in Blynk App:

WATER LEVEL IN BLYNK APP

IFTTT Connected to Adafruit for Whether Update:

Water Level & Whether Information Results on the Adafruit:

Result Analysis: The given system can be controlled from any corner of the world. The pumping system can also be monitored and controlled at any time at any place. Smart automation to overview the deteriorating groundwater level and save it to some extent in houseware as well as in industrial purposes. The electricity crisis of the country can also be met by saving electricity in the working of these pumps.