XBee Water Level Monitoring

For our senior project we are going to develop a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) prototype system which will monitor water level in a certain flood-prone area in Naga City. For this, we have chosen Zigbee as the technology to use. The title of our study is "Zigbee-based Water Level Monitoring and Data Acquisition System" which is based on a previous study developed by another set of senior year students in our university two years ago. The system delivers great features like SMS flood forecasting but since it was built from the traditional wired communication, certain limitations hinder its successful implementations. These limitations are a) scalability and b) flexibility in terms of distance and locations. Thus, our group aims to overcome these limitations by developing a wireless prototype of the said system. However, we are not going to include the SMS feature of the previous system and instead focus on the deployment of the wireless network with reliable data acquisition.

For this project we are going to use XBee PRO 802.15.4 RF module (2.4 GHz), Arduino platform for its MCU, differential sensor and alarm device which make up the package of our "mote". For the gateway we will simply use another Xbee module and Explorer USB. For data acquisition, GUI will be developed using Visual Basic and the database using MySQL. The alarm will be triggered of a critical water level is detected.

This paper presents an embedded wireless sensor network prototype system for data acquisition and water level monitoring using Zigbee solution. A gateway built from a commercially-available Zigbee module is connected via a USB interface to a Microsoft Windows PC, which is set as the central data collection point. Data collected by remote devices is transmitted according to the Zigbee protocol and received by the gateway. Each remote device is built of another ZigBee module, Arduino MCU, differential pressure sensor and alarm device. The MCU will be programmed to control the sensor, the Zigbee module and the alarm device. The development of graphical user interface (GUI) for monitoring purposes is another main component of the project. The GUI should be able to display the parameters being monitored continuously in real time. The data is then recorded in the database and can be retrieved anytime.