I need my Arduino to measure the water level in a 50 gallon drum. I don't need very fine resolution, in fact I really only need to know when the drum is almost empty.
I found a few posts that recommend doing this by measuring pressure in a column of air or water, such as this blog post:
And I could dfo it by measuring the weight of the drum. But for my purposes I was hoping for an even simpler solution, and one that would allow me to mount the Arduino 10 meters or so from the water barrel.
I used to have an RV that measured the level in its water tank via a sensor placed in the water itself. All the sensor did was know if there was water at that point. Note that it could distinguish between it being a little wet and actually submerged. Can anyone think of a way to do this?
If you want to PM your e-mail address to me, I have a file that was in Kitplanes magazine about 10 years ago for a pretty slick fuel gauge. It could easily be used for water as well. The file is much less than 1 MB. You may be able to adapt to Arduino.
First, I think you'll have to decide what kind of level sensor you'll use. That will kind of determine how you interface. If you do something similar to what you linked above, you could use the digital inputs to the arduino. I'm not sure, though, what you would do once you've "told" the arduino what the levels are. Seems that maybe an analog float sensor would work better. You could set certain ranges in the A/D input and have it display something that is dependent on the input level. 0-5VDC = 0-1023 on your A/D. You could say that 0-1VDC, which would be 0-204 in your A/D, 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5, would each be a specific response from the arduino.
Is this all making sense?
Anyway, I think the sensor needs to be chosen first. If you have two choices, I could give you some ideas for each.
We used many different methods and sensors to measure levels in many different vessels holding many different materials. In your application, water and low pressure, I would recommend something simple and reliable, a float switch. Here is one that looks promising: