Thinking of building a water temp/level sensor that i can put in the field to monitor water containers for animals, need this to be able to connect thru cellular because of distance. Any ideas on what i would need in terms of hardware. I'm new to this and looking at getting into programming and building my own. I'm not new to computer programming or electronics. Just new to Arduino
Rather an advanced project for a beginner.
However, the is an instructable on a similar project, not that instructables are necessarily good at the best of times, but this one seems to have been accepted as "out of the ordinary".
Water temp seems an odd request.......
Search the forum here too - other folks have worked on similar projects.
Welcome! Interesting problem but the animals get thirsty as well. You need to determine how to power it, and if batteries how long it needs to run. Also consider looking at solar power with rechargeable batteries. You can extend your battery life a long time if it is not powered or in deep sleep most of the time. The water sensor will be interesting, there are many possibilities but they have to survive the animals. With a minimal amount of external components you can power down the the processor etc and use the alarm of the RTC chip to wake it up maybe once a day but that is totally programmable. If you set the time it could report that, if not it would be a timer.
So many puns in one fragment.
some time ago I used a waterproof ultrasonic level sesnor to measure river level together with other information being transmitted using LoRaWAN to myDevices/cayenne for display, e.g.
I was reading the sensors and uploading data every 10 minutes
you can see the river is tidal – rise and fall of about 10cm
today I would probably use a TTGO LoRa32 board as it has a onboard ESP32 microcontroller, lora module and a OLED display
clearly access is required to a LoRaWAN gateway so an alternative is a GSM modem (assuming you have network coverage) or WiFi i (if you have coverage)
Edit: water temperature was measured using a DS18B20
Arduino is really just programming & electronics - so just think how you would normally go about such a project...
Why specifically cellular?
Other long range options include things like LoRa(WAN) and Sigfox ...
Even if it does need to be cellular, there are many options nowadays.
Note that 2G and, particularly, 3G are obsolescent - they are being shutdown.
Apart from 4G/5G, there are also NB-IoT and LTE-M - sometimes known as "Cellular IoT" ...
(other suppliers are available)
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