I'm very new in this, so, i'll try to be as accurate as possible but please be gentle with me :).
I'm working in a Fish farm and I would like to set up a monitoring system.
Initial conditions :
The owner has his house 500meters away from the pools, the pools are an open circuit of water, where the water is coming from a small river, and going back in once passed through the pools.
Sometimes, they way gets blocked by leaves and the level in the pool gets critical.
Secondely, if a power cut happens, the aerators shutdown ... and this can turn quickly bad
What I need :
So ! I will be setting up a wifi relay between the pools and his house, next to the pools we have a small building where i'm going to set up a computer (which will receive datas from sensors).
And here is where it gets hard for me, Im struggling to know what would be the best option for my case, arduino seems to be a potential solution for what I want which is :
-Setting up a video feed (that won't record, i just want to be able to remotely activate and monitor when i need)
-Having a sensor that catch the tension (I wanna know when a powercut happens)
-And monitoring basical stuff like the level of my pool, the 02 in the water, temperature...
I heard about Lora and Lorawan as well, tell me guys what do you think about it,
Most obvious is the need for battery backup to power the system when mains power is out. You need to design for long outage time as well as multiple short time outages.
Paul
20 to 50 watt 12V solar cell, a PWM charge controller, a LIFEPO4 16+ Ah battery.
A WIFi repeater in the shed, I'd use ESP32's for the project. For the cam, I'd use a ESP32-CAM.
I have a solar powered weather station in my backyard. I am using a human presence sensor to trigger a ESP32CAM to take pictures of the weather station. I send those pictures through WiFI to a RPi for distrubtion.
In the shed, consider using a Raspberry Pi 4 as the server to the ESP32's doing the sensing. The RPi4 can run a program or using Node-Red get the data from the ESP32 and process the data.
The thing with batteries + solar is that it comes with a price, especially if we speak long outtage. The owner would be ok if he is simply noticed when power goes down (by connecting on the server), so I was thinking, i set up a small backup for the computer overthere (sensors got their own batteries if i'm right?) and i add a sensor that will notice the server when tension goes down? reasonable? feasable ? Powercuts occure mostly when storms are passing around here (so the owner could check from his house and do something right away). But I'll discuss it with him anyway.
I'll take time to check the ESP32 specifications also since i'm not familiar at all with all those hardwares, any thoughts on the programming part? is arduino a complicated language to come by? is there a lot of existing pre-programmed stuff?
I'm planning a small power backup only for the server/wifirelay, even if wifi consumes a bit, it shouldnt requires so much investment, and if i'm right, the sensors shall have their own batteries embedded. And if a power cut occured in the farm, it wont always be the case at the owner's house because they are on 2 different grids
We wont be setting up batteries and generators (or solar) for the time being (that might the next priority but components like aerators are really greedy in term of energy so we prefer to find a way to by pass it for now)
The automatic SMS to smartphone would be ideal in some scenarios indeed, any thoughts on the most appriorate way to do it? I really knows little in the matter (So if you have a specific system in mind, don't hesitate! )
That's a design choice as well (and a failure point to worry about).
it wont always be the case at the owner's house because they are on 2 different grids
OK, but do you need to worry about it? it would be safer if some care is applied to the reception part of the solution.
Using SMS requires that your arduino has access to a GSM module equipped with a SIM card and a suitable subscription. This could be a basic arduino + an Arduino GSM add-on (like SIM800) or you could use an arduino with the capability built in like the Arduino MKR GSM 1400
Where I live you can get a SIM card for pretty cheap monthly fees (2€) so it's a convenient solution that does not break the bank and you can send SMS notification to multiple admins.
it's probably worth discussing with whoever will pay for the solution to see what features are desirable, that will let you come up with the requirements definition, which will drive the technical solution decisions.
Thanks for the replies so far, as soon as I got enough time, i'll try to draw and share the full design of the system with its components (at least what I understood!), so i hope you guys can advise me a bit and tell me if i'm going in the right direction !
Btw, sorry for the double topic in French Jackson, i just thought that it might be ok to ask for both communities (and that nobody would notice ! ahah)
Cheers
!