i'm new at arduino world,i need help from professionals what sensors i need!!

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello there, it's my first time using arduino

i need it for a part in my bachelor project, i'm stuck i don't know what are the proper sensors for my project, then i have to use esp8266, i have to use iot technologie (that i don't know yet how i should do it with Blynk or any other application)
please someone help there's no much time for the deadline of my report deposit....please someone help this helpless girl :cry: :cry: :cry:

i need to plant a simple predictive maintenance for a vessel (i'm a mechanical marine student), using sensors of the most important machines functioning parameters and use mobile wifi for continuous monitoring of these parametres 24/7.

*so i need to know except LM35 temperature sensor is there any sensor compatible with arduino uno that can be used for higher temperatures -70 Celcius / +700 Celsius and how to use it ??

*except BMP180/280 is there any higher pressure sensor about 10 kg/cm2 ?

*level of water or oil sensor maximum 200L ??

  • Vibration sensor ?

i need help i don't have much time, at least if someone knows some sensors codes or references so that i can search on how to plant wires and how to write ide programs then how to connect them to iot clouds or Blynk...

i'm really stuck i don't have much time to learn all, so i need your help pleaase
thank you in advance :-[

*** please check the code of measurement of temperature with the LM35 on comment #14 here in the same topic***

2

When is your report is due?

Consider posting on the Gigs & Collaborations forum section and be prepared to pay for the help.

3

Hard to believe you are in a rush and have not even started identifying components or leaning the basics for iOT etc... since when do you have this assignment?

Ask guidance to your teachers for what is available to play with and work on your specs. How will that be mounted ? What type of pressure do you mesure? Etc

for the temperature look for wide range Thermocouple (There are multiple types, type K could work) and will need an amplifier like For Example MAX31855K or MCP9600 with a suitable Thermocouple Type-K

For the others sensors it depends how you can build your system and exact physical nature of what you are trying to capture and constraints

4

You are collecting data, for maintenance purposes, from various sensors on a boat.
You’ve identified some of the parameters you want to measure and you have an idea how to analyze the data to determine maintenance requirements.

The first issue is how realistic your solution has to be. In the real world, the boat probably will not have continuous Internet access, but you would still have to collect and store the data anyway, and presumably make it accessible to users on the boat. This implies running a local web server, which the ESP8266, that you have been asked to use, can do. It can also, when Internet becomes available, send the collected data to a central server.

However, since the exercise is a marine engineering exercise and not a computer science exercise, it is probably best to simplify it (if you are permitted) to design something which can be easily demonstrated but still reasonably realistic.

The simplest approach is probably to assume the continuous availability of a Wlan with Internet access and use the ESP8266 to simply read the sensors at regular intervals and send the immediately to a central server so that it can be accessed by web browsers, smartphones etc.

Are you going to have to build a test rig where you physically install these sensors, say the pressure where you have to create a 10kg/sq cm pressure, or do you simply have to show from a data sheet that it would work , or are you allowed to simulate its behavior in software? Or is the whole thing a pure paper exercise?

What, incidentally, on a boat can reach a temperature of 700 degrees Celsius? The inside of a combustion chamber?

5

6v6gt:
What, incidentally, on a boat can reach a temperature of 700 degrees Celsius? The inside of a combustion chamber?

Exhaust Gas Temperature. I don't know about boats but in carbureted airplane motors knowing the EGT is critical.

OP- fluid level sensors that I've seen are sonar-type which are not water or oil friendly. Does the motor already have float-type levels that you could just tap into? You could build a capacitive meter that may work with hostile fluids, but there is nothing off the shelf that I am aware of.

For the pressure transducer- look at this from Honeywell.

If you find sensors, look for I2C interface. If all your sensors are I2C then interfacing a bunch of them to the ESP8266 will be easy. With one caveat: wires to the sensors have to be pretty short. The I2C spec is something like 15-inches, but I and many others here have has I2C lines up to 10 ft. and more. If you need further, then you can add an I2C repeater in the line.

Have you selected an ESP8266 board yet? My recommendation is the NodeMCU.

6

Exhaust Gas Temperature makes sense. Obviously you have to know the application before choosing a sensor, to ensure it is appropriate for the operating environment (robustness, resistance to corrosion etc. etc.) . That must then be a specific type of sensor and one may even already be present, although these may not be shareable.

7

Thank you all for your help i really appreciate it

8

J-M-L:
Hard to believe you are in a rush and have not even started identifying components or leaning the basics for iOT etc... since when do you have this assignment?

Ask guidance to your teachers for what is available to play with and work on your specs. How will that be mounted ? What type of pressure do you mesure? Etc

for the temperature look for wide range Thermocouple (There are multiple types, type K could work) and will need an amplifier like For Example MAX31855K or MCP9600 with a suitable Thermocouple Type-K

For the others sensors it depends how you can build your system and exact physical nature of what you are trying to capture and constraints

sorry for the trouble, i appreciate your help, i had plenty of time but even so without the internship before doing the project because of covid-19, it's impossible for me to complete the last part of my report on my own, i will check the links you send me, the project should be simple not a professional one i'm not an engineer, i only need to know what sensors are compatible with parametres table of the vessel and search for fritzing and ide programs to make the solution easier to understand as i said before my major is mechanics we don't learn about arduino just C++ program and basic information in each field, i read an article of IoT and i liked the idea , and it seems good for vessels if they use it too, that will reduce cost of conditional maintenance
thank you so much for the links

9

6v6gt:
You are collecting data, for maintenance purposes, from various sensors on a boat.
You’ve identified some of the parameters you want to measure and you have an idea how to analyze the data to determine maintenance requirements.

The first issue is how realistic your solution has to be. In the real world, the boat probably will not have continuous Internet access, but you would still have to collect and store the data anyway, and presumably make it accessible to users on the boat. This implies running a local web server, which the ESP8266, that you have been asked to use, can do. It can also, when Internet becomes available, send the collected data to a central server.

However, since the exercise is a marine engineering exercise and not a computer science exercise, it is probably best to simplify it (if you are permitted) to design something which can be easily demonstrated but still reasonably realistic.

The simplest approach is probably to assume the continuous availability of a Wlan with Internet access and use the ESP8266 to simply read the sensors at regular intervals and send the immediately to a central server so that it can be accessed by web browsers, smartphones etc.

Are you going to have to build a test rig where you physically install these sensors, say the pressure where you have to create a 10 kg/sq cm pressure, or do you simply have to show from a data sheet that it would work , or are you allowed to simulate its behavior in software? Or is the whole thing a pure paper exercise?

What, incidentally, on a boat can reach a temperature of 700 degrees Celsius? The inside of a combustion chamber?

hehe it's like if you're a fortune teller, all what you said is exactly is the truth.
for the temperature part for the example of vessels i have 650 degrees the limit exhaust temperature in the turbo entry in the main engine

for your question
''do you simply have to show from a data sheet that it would work , or are you allowed to simulate its behavior in software?''

I just need to make it simple, and as you said to show that it works from a datasheet, so i need a fritzing schemas of each sensor with the ESP8266, and a blynk test for each sensor so that i can show how the IOT technology is more promising in the maintenance in maritime field.

my goal is to make teachers convinced in this technology even if there is some obstacles such as network absence sometimes, but still it's good for the maritime companies to consider it because thanks to monitoring of the functioning parameters it will be easy for the company to make decision of postponing the trip or make it longer (trip of fisheries vessels)

10

SteveMann:
Exhaust Gas Temperature. I don't know about boats but in carbureted airplane motors knowing the EGT is critical.

OP- fluid level sensors that I've seen are sonar-type which are not water or oil friendly. Does the motor already have float-type levels that you could just tap into? You could build a capacitive meter that may work with hostile fluids, but there is nothing off the shelf that I am aware of.

For the pressure transducer- look at this from Honeywell.

If you find sensors, look for I2C interface. If all your sensors are I2C then interfacing a bunch of them to the ESP8266 will be easy. With one caveat: wires to the sensors have to be pretty short. The I2C spec is something like 15-inches, but I and many others here have has I2C lines up to 10 ft. and more. If you need further, then you can add an I2C repeater in the line.

Have you selected an ESP8266 board yet? My recommendation is the NodeMCU.

thank you for the help i will check the link and your advices, for the ESP8266 i wanted to make the project in the real world, but because of covid-19 it's inconvenient, i already have the arduino and some other components, but the most important esp8266 and some other sensors not yet delivered. so fritzing and blynk screenshots will do. i only need to find the right sensors and search for how to wire them with arduino and esp8266 and connect it to blynk.

11

6v6gt:
Exhaust Gas Temperature makes sense. Obviously you have to know the application before choosing a sensor, to ensure it is appropriate for the operating environment (robustness, resistance to corrosion etc. etc.) . That must then be a specific type of sensor and one may even already be present, although these may not be shareable.

yeah you're right, thank you for the advice

12

this is an image of the parameters

1- is the higher pressure so i don't know what is the right sensor, can a bmp280 be efficient to calculate such as higher pressures.
2- is the highest temperature so as you said the thermocouple is the solution here

and please if someone can help me with wiring of these sensors and the esp8266 with arduino on fritzing or ide program i will appreciate your help.
and sorry for troubling you.

Untitled.jpg
Untitled.jpg710×451 142 KB

13

could you envision listing which sensors would make sense in "production world" and create an IOT demonstrator with consumer grade technology? would that be acceptable?

That would make your life much easier as there are tons of examples to read t°, pressure and drive actuators and report centrally through an IOT infrastructure such as Blynk

I would be very cautious about that statement

so that i can show how the IOT technology is more promising in the maintenance in maritime field

Probably like in many other domains (predictive maintenance, early failure signs detection, ...). But Ships are bulky metallic things which are not very friendly to let WiFi signals go through and engines and other equipments creates tons of magnetic interferences. You will have to discus the environment in your report/presentation.

A collaborative reporting to a central unit using a physical (wires) bus architecture that is proven to be robust to interferences (look at "CAN bus" for example) is important to explore in my opinion rather than discrete ESPs reporting on what they monitor and hoping the signal will safely go through. so your demonstrator might need something like this too

14

J-M-L:
could you envision listing which sensors would make sense in "production world" and create an IOT demonstrator with consumer grade technology? would that be acceptable?

That would make your life much easier as there are tons of examples to read t°, pressure and drive actuators and report centrally through an IOT infrastructure such as Blynk

I would be very cautious about that statement Probably like in many other domains (predictive maintenance, early failure signs detection, ...). But Ships are bulky metallic things which are not very friendly to let WiFi signals go through and engines and other equipments creates tons of magnetic interferences. You will have to discus the environment in your report/presentation.

A collaborative reporting to a central unit using a physical (wires) bus architecture that is proven to be robust to interferences (look at "CAN bus" for example) is important to explore in my opinion rather than discrete ESPs reporting on what they monitor and hoping the signal will safely go through. so your demonstrator might need something like this too

I think you have a point, but as long as i know there are already sensors in engines salle for the main board used to launch alarms if there's a malfunctioning or something similar.

After discussing this topic with you guys i found out a lot of holes in my project especially the Wi-Fi part, i think it would be efficient if i use for example sd card to stock data, but it's already too late to change the iot part, so i will just go with the esp8266 for the time being, who knows it's a project to improve in the future maybe wi-fi conditions in maritime field may be more improved.
The most important goal in this project is that maritime companies can make decisions easily, so for some type of fisheries vessels they own who navigate around 12 miles far from the offshore is beneficial, because they can still have signal to send the data to the company.

I have a question please correct me if i'm wrong, as i know that esp8266 can send the data to an IOT infrastructure as blynk, but it just hit me now, is it right that esp8266 can still send data to the phone and the phone only needs to be connected to network even without Wifi around only using cellular data 3G-4G for example? or it should be connected to the cloud on phone through Wi-Fi? and if i use such as Blynk app is it possible for someone else in another far place to use the same cloud (like sharing the same account) and reach the data?
thank you for your guidance and sorry for the trouble

15

Please someone check this code for me

#include <ESP8266WiFi.h>
#include <BlynkSimpleEsp8266.h>
#include <SimpleTimer.h>

#define BLYNK_PRINT Serial

char auth[] = "IPAdresse";
char ssid[] = "Nom du reseau";
char pass[] = "Mot de passe";

BlynkTimer timer;

void setup()
{

  Serial.begin(9600);
  Blynk.begin(auth, ssid, pass);
  timer.setInterval(1000, myTimerEvent);
}

void myTimerEvent()
{
// mesurment of temperature between (-40°C ~ +110°C)
  
  int valeur_brute = analogRead(A0);
  int valeur_offset = analogRead(A1);
  
  float temperature_celcius = (valeur_brute - valeur_offset) * (5.0 / 1023.0 * 100.0);

  Serial.println(temperature_celcius);
  delay(250);

  Blynk.virtualWrite(V5, temperature_celcius);
}


void loop()
{
  Blynk.run();
  timer.run(); 

}

this is my first code on arduino i don't know if it's correct because i tried to gather all my few knowledge of these last days to write it

16

WiFi is WiFi and electromagnetic laws are not likely to change anytime soon... hoping that the weak small antenna of your ESP will catch a signal in a potentially very "noisy" (electro-magnetically) environment or have reception for a WiFi or 4G signal is quite a strong bet...

The argument that it’s too late and that half baked / poor decisions are made but you need to stick to it is plain stupid (not a value judgment on you).

I see this often in students’ projects where they have made poor hardware choices early without exploring constraints and requirements and then don’t have the guts to take a step back when they realize it won’t work and try to find excuses.

You are learning to become a decision maker (bachelor level) and recognizing a dead end is part of a project’s course. You should embrace that learning and make it a part of your report.

I can tell you that when you’ll present your work to a panel they will give you a very hard time on this (or when a jury will evaluate your work if you don’t present in person).

You can either stay the course and explain that your ESP based WiFi solution will not work in real life (and explain what architecture would be needed and explain why you went that way because your work is about predictive maintenance, IOT, benefits of big data in maritime world and thus you went for an easy way to demonstrate data collection) or correct course and have a small wired bus (no need to go for CAN, the bus concept is what matters) and explain the system architecture of slave units collaboratively reporting their data on a bus to a master located where cellular signals is available(GPRS, satellite, 3G/4G/5G) which will be the one connected to the IOT server.

To your code - Have you tried your code? Does it work?

There are zillions blynk examples to capture a value and export it to blynk - so its a one minute work to change the two lines that read the values with analogRead if that’s what you want to do.

Have a look at the library's examples and start from there

17

J-M-L:
WiFi is WiFi and electromagnetic laws are not likely to change anytime soon... hoping that the weak small antenna of your ESP will catch a signal in a potentially very "noisy" (electro-magnetically) environment or have reception for a WiFi or 4G signal is quite a strong bet...

The argument that it’s too late and that half baked / poor decisions are made but you need to stick to it is plain stupid (not a value judgment on you).

I see this often in students’ projects where they have made poor hardware choices early without exploring constraints and requirements and then don’t have the guts to take a step back when they realize it won’t work and try to find excuses.

You are learning to become a decision maker (bachelor level) and recognizing a dead end is part of a project’s course. You should embrace that learning and make it a part of your report.

I can tell you that when you’ll present your work to a panel they will give you a very hard time on this (or when a jury will evaluate your work if you don’t present in person).

You can either stay the course and explain that your ESP based WiFi solution will not work in real life (and explain what architecture would be needed and explain why you went that way because your work is about predictive maintenance, IOT, benefits of big data in maritime world and thus you went for an easy way to demonstrate data collection) or correct course and have a small wired bus (no need to go for CAN, the bus concept is what matters) and explain the system architecture of slave units collaboratively reporting their data on a bus to a master located where cellular signals is available(GPRS, satellite, 3G/4G/5G) which will be the one connected to the IOT server.

To your code - Have you tried your code? Does it work?

There are zillions blynk examples to capture a value and export it to blynk - so its a one minute work to change the two lines that read the values with analogRead if that’s what you want to do.

Have a look at the library's examples and start from there

for the blynk library i already used that link, i tried my best to gather all the informations , i didn't try it because as i said before my Esp and other sensors not yet delivered it's been already about 4 months because of covid-19 . So i only have to stick to fritzing and IDE. teachers know that already, and there was a lot of obstacles for all the students not only me.

i'm not trying to make excuses, i know that you're saying that for my sake, i really appreciate that. i failed to choose the right option because i lack knowledge and informations and i neglected the environment of the project.

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you’re not innovating enough. – Elon Musk

it's not that i don't admit it, but still that doesn't mean i didn't learn anything. i know it's stupid to stick to the dead end but we will never know until we do it by ourselves that's how i can learn to improve myself and grow up.

I said that i will stick to the wifi because it's already decided and i have to send the report today or tomorrow, i can only overcome that in my presentation and explain it without affecting my project, i have my way to convince the jury of my project, (it's a little stupid to attempt to fool my teachers but i can use this few knowledge to overcome the situation because my teachers lack knowledge in this field of arduino and IOT, i know their background they only know about mechanics).
Don't get me wrong i'm not a bad person or trying to lie to my teachers, but i have to be the lawyer for the patient, no matter what even if it's really the culprit i still have to defend him. it's all about using knowledge to get people's judgment to your side.

i'm not feeling good about what i attempt to do, but after i finish this matter i will correct my mistake and learn more about how to improve the project, because i want to prove myself to my own self.

Very sorry for disappointing you, and thank you for the help.

18

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you're not innovating enough. - Elon Musk

Yeah but here the failure is to not conduct requirement analysis before making decisions... Nothing to do with innovation :slight_smile:

That being said, there is always positive in facing such issues as long as you learn from them.

I would not try to "fool the teachers" - first it does not take a strong expert to think that WiFi might be a challenge and in general thinking you are the smart one in the room turns out badly... I think you'd be better off arguing that given the context you went for that limited option that would help focus on the data gathering and iOT and machine learning or whatever in a simple way and offer the idea that in harsh environments a wired system would offer more robustness.

Very sorry for disappointing you,

You did not. I was sharing what I think. you make what you want out of it

19

I guess if I were given this task as I understand the one you have been given, I might try to deal with it with with two deliverables:

a) Power point / Visio etc. presentation - high level concepts

Rough out a network architecture on a boat which consists of a WLAN and an Ethernet and call it "boat local cloud 1".
Show some sensors on the boat to be WLAN connected, others cabled with ethernet. All sensors deposit data on an server in "boat local cloud" and boat based engineers on the boat can connect to this server using smartphones or cable connected PC's

Sketch out a land based network called "global cloud" and draw a dotted line to "boat local cloud 1", labeled "radio data replication link", and show on-shore engineers accessing this "global cloud" over smartphones and PC's

Show a future scenario with enhanced wireless technologies gradually displacing direct cabeled sensors.

All this to convey the idea that, for example, data from an exhaust gas sensor on boat X can get to cloud environment where multiple engineers can access it and subscribe to reports about maintenance relevant events.

You can also show entry of configuration information etc. like alarm thresholds and the like, an automatic notifications being pushed out.

b) Tiny demonstration

With a simple temperature sensor connected to an ESP8266 to the Blynk network , show data getting from a sensor to a smartphone which is enough to claim that you have created a simple model of the whole concept.

Further, remember that IOT is very loosely defined, and it is quite OK to say that all the above technologies fit in this IOT concept definition.

20

Exactly the story telling :wink:

Shows OP has looked into the topics, current issues and opportunities, offers an evolving architecture and then some sort oF POC (proof of concept) based on IOT.

Would be nice to explore what is exported and how that can be useful to optimize operating costs or performance or whatever meaningful KPI the target population would value.