ultrasonic 433Mhz cistern fill level

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Hi guys,

im looking for the right hardware to build an fill level checker for my cistern. the idea is to do it with ultrasonic sensor HC-SR04. but i dont want to put my raspberry in the cistern.
the distance between the house and the cistern is 10m.
it should be cheap and with low power consumption.

i do have no expierence with arduino nano or similar.

im happy for any ideas or tutorials.
thanks a lot.
Daniel

you could use a wireless sensor like this one: http://www.mysensors.org/build/distance or u use a rain/water level sensor. maybe less expensive and more efficient.

You can try my RF box
I have build in the HC-SR04 to send via 433 RF every x minutes
https://github.com/incmve/generic-rfbox

I have this running on a Arduino nano.

the waterlevel sensors cannot meassure that deep, only some cm
maybe some ultrasonic device would be an option?

edit - mrblonde just showed it up - the ulrasonic device from mysensors.
here’s the plugin https://www.npmjs.com/package/pimatic-mysensors
BUT as i’ve seen the ultrasonic device isn’t supported by the plugin by now.

maybe @Dheeraj can do some magic ?

sorry to hijack this theme but guess for more information on the ultrasonic device from sweebee it’s important to know :
@sweebee
how do you power your sensor boxes? with batteries?
i guess the arduino mini still needs a lots of energy so that a battery powering probably could be ineffective especially at outdoor usage? what are your experiences?

@leader21 i’m using 2 aaa or aa batteries. Used a attiny with sleep and interrupt. I havent used the pro mini’s. I have ordered Some.

In sleep mode the attiny uses Some uA’s. My attiny with pir uses around 0.18mA.

Try to use sleep as much as possible and use a pin interrupt for pirs or a watchdogtimer for temp. Analog sensor can be a problem. You have to figure out how you want your data. Send the data Every 30 seconds or only if the analog data has a certain value, if you do that you could sleep the attiny for 5 secs or 10 secs and measure.

for the Arduino pro mini I remeber the following help for saving energy:
http://www.mysensors.org/build/battery

thanks for all your ideas. especially the RF box sounds really interesting.
i think first of all i have to dive into the arduino nano/mini topic.
do you have a link with good tutorial for beginners?

i did it (with a raspberry pi a+):

http://www.bilder-upload.eu/show.php?file=ccef4a-1440932237.jpg
the display looks quiet nicer in real life.
The Pi shows the fill level at the display (last day, last hour, last two intervals) and publishes it to thingspeak.com

dk00000

Nice project and also nice enclosure!
where did you get it from?

I slaughtered a 30 years old telecomunication device. No idea what for a device it was. It was a grey box so after i built in the lcd i painted it black.
Now i look for nice stickers or letters to write something on the box. Any ideas?

another question:
is it possible to show the level in pimatic like a loading bar, lets say 5000L is 100% (and 0 is 0%)
any ideas?

@dk00000 said:

Now i look for nice stickers or letters to write something on the box. Any ideas?

• If you have the patience to do so you can buy sheets with letters which can be fixed on a solid ground by rubbing the sheet area with a pencil or such. For example http://www.amazon.de/Letraset-Rubbelbuchstaben-A5-Bogen-Schriftart-Helvetica/dp/B009GKT91Q I am not sure the letters are resistant against scratches. So, additional measures may be required to make it solid (e.g. painting it with transparent color to cover the surface with a protective skin)

• Another solution is to use a label printer (e.g. Brother P-Touch). The simplest model which costs around 25 EUR can print a single line of variable length. The result would be having white-colored stickers with black letters printed on it. Other options, e.g. other colors, may also be available. I remember we had yellow stickers in the office. The sticker are robust and durable.

• Another choice maybe to use a fine paint marker like the Edding 780. The price is about 3 EUR.

@dk00000 said:

is it possible to show the level in pimatic like a loading bar, lets say 5000L is 100% (and 0 is 0%)

Despite the possibility to add custom gadgets to Pimatic by implementing a plugin, a simple solution may be to use the DummyDimmer which displays a slider. The slider value can changed using the Pimatic REST API. There two things missing however:

• an option to make the the slider read-only. In the front-end this would result in something like $('#mySlider').slider({ disabled: true });
• an option to display the slider value as text side-by-side - in the front-end this should be possible via css override

@dk00000 said:

Now i look for nice stickers or letters to write something on the box. Any ideas?

having a very good idea! I’ll tell you later when I’m back home. could you please post the dimensions of the area where you want to have your label?
and where are you from? Germany would be fine ('cause of shipping costs).
I guess you’ll love it

@dk00000 said:

another question:
is it possible to show the level in pimatic like a loading bar, lets say 5000L is 100% (and 0 is 0%)
any ideas?

iam also interested to show the filllevel like a loading bar.

i got it,
add a dummy dimmer;

{
  "class": "DummyDimmer",
  "id": "dummy-dimmer",
  "name": "Dummy Dimmer"
},

add ar rule like this:

If distance of US change Then dim Dummy Dimmer to round((Volume/Volume-full)*100,1)

the only question i have is, when the value is 17, the dimmer will be dimmet to 15 and because the steps are 5% how is it possible to change the steps to 1 % or is it possible to set a max min value for the dimmer lets say from 0 - 4000 liter.

is there any possibility to make the dummy dimmer as read only device?

@p4co86 said:

is it possible to change the steps to 1 %

The rendering to 5% steps is done in the frontend - see https://github.com/pimatic/pimatic-mobile-frontend/blob/master/app/views/pages/index.jade#L21 As far as I know the scaling is not done in the pimatic core.

Generally, it is possible to override this behaviour by providing a custom template. As far as I know, the only way to do this is to write plugin. It would be nice if certain options like scale, display options (e.g. read-only !) could be controlled via the device configuration properties. As far as I can see there is no easy solution without changing the code.

@p4co86 said:

is there any possibility to make the dummy dimmer as read only device?

No. See http://forum.pimatic.org/topic/242/ultrasonic-433mhz-cistern-fill-level/13