Update : On 30th Dec 2018 this project has been selected as one of the winners of the District Level Competition and will now participate in the state level event.
The Government of India hosts an annual event named Inspire Awards which is aimed at selecting talent from all the schools who have a scientific bend of mind or have great ideas.
In the first round participants are required to submit the idea summary in 500 words. Once they are reviewed and shortlisted the Telangana Government provides and aid of Rs.10000 to the selected students to develop a prototype of their ideas.
My son, Dhruv submitted his idea of monitoring the health of the water bodies using smart sensors and IOT as the water bodies are in a constant threat of pollution.
His idea got shortlisted and the 10k got deposited in the account. At that time we had no idea if we would be able to create a working model to provide a proof of concept.
After some research, we zeroed on to using an Arduino Mega 2560 which was better suited for these kind of projects compared to a Raspberry Pi. Getting all the components for the project was not easy. Few we ordered from Amazon and few we procured from a local shop, PotentialLabs, which we found after a lot of searching.
Once the components were delivered, we realised that most of them did not have a manual or guide and we had to rely on Google search to figure out how to connect each one individually to Arduino and make it work. Once we were able to test all the easy individual components, we started testing them as a unit starting with LCD, adding the turbidity sensor, the red, green and blue LEDs, the GSM module and so on.
The Arduino IDE was very helpful as it had a lot of inbuilt examples with code which we could customise. The GSM module was the easiest to connect but the most difficult to test mostly due to connectivity issues. At one point we almost a reached a point where we felt that this is not going to work. But then we went back to the basics. We tested the GSM module as a standalone system. To our surprise it worked. Then we had to go incrementally once again to make the complete project work as envisioned.
Here is a video of the demo of the finished project.
Here is the schematic diagram, the ‘visual’ for concept depiction and the circuit diagram.
Wonderful thing sirji