Hydero

Hydero is built using Rasberry Pi 2 running Windows 10 IoT Core OS. It provides a simple solution to a tedious problem of manually operating a motor to fill up water tank.

(Note: At the time of writing this article, the project is in prototype phase)

Following is a complete list of components:

* Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 2 x 1
• HDMI connector x 1 (to see the app and interface on a Display device)
• Potentiometer x 2 (to regulate sensitivity of the rain sensor)
• Rain sensor x 2 (to detect water level, the unit I used: http://amzn.to/1XkV4lc)
• LED x 1 (to indicate any activity)
• Relay x 1 (to control the motor)

* Software

• Windows 10 Pro
• Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition with update 1 (https://www.visualstudio.com/)
• Windows 10 SDK

Problem statement: It has been a bit of a challenge for anyone having overhead water tank to manually operate as there are varying factors affecting the operation time and frequency:

• Capacity of water tank is variable.

• Diameter of plumbing pipe is variable, which affects in time taken to fill up the overhead water tank.

• Motor capacity is variable, which results in undue over run of motor to repeatedly fill overhead water tank.

Also in many cities across India, the time of water distribution by the corporation is early in the morning and certain cities get water distributed only during early morning hours, which if missed, can leave the resident without water for the whole day.

Solution

With the help of this DIY kit, anyone can install it upon the overhead water tank with minimal technical guidance and get started within minutes.

How it works?

Once installed, Rasberry PI 2 takes care of the monitoring if the tank is getting empty or already empty, depending upon which it can start the motor automatically and keep it running until the overhead water tank is filled up, once filled up Rasberry Pi 2 will shut down the motor automatically.

This kit does not require Internet to function, but if connected, it will push important consumption related data to a Microsoft Azure storage account and that information can be used by our analytics engine to predict water consumption and requirement by the resident and if installed everywhere, can help a governing body within the region to understand the water consumption behaviour pattern within a region and act accordingly to satisfy the water demand in that region.

Challenges (so far and forecast)

Insulation of the Rain sensor and maintain accuracy of the reading after continuous use of the unit, after a few days it shows some random not so accurate behaviour, we're working out a solution to fix it.

Keeping the device always power on even when electricity is not available, to fix this, we plan to adapt to solar power in next update to this project.