A low-cost, open-source autonomous surface vehicle as a multipurpose waste stabilization pond monitoring platform

Abstract Although waste stabilization ponds (WSPs) are widely used in developing countries, monitoring data on their operational performance are scarce. Traditional methods for monitoring in-pond conditions, i.e. conducting hand held measurements from a small boat or installing fixed sensor networks, are not straightforward to realize and create an unhealthy working environment for field workers. A promising technology for the safe and efficient collection of monitoring data is a compact autonomous surface vehicle (ASV), capable of autonomous navigation along a predefined trajectory based on geographic coordinates and measurements in different places and depths. In this practical paper, the development process, technical details and functional testing results of a low-cost ASV for WSP monitoring are presented. Commonly available construction materials and electronic components were used to ensure affordability and reparability. The access to online tutorials and peer-support was crucial for assembling the open-source autopilot and data logger. The ASV demonstrated satisfactory performance for both the autonomous navigation as well as the georeferenced data logging of measurements at a real-scale WSP in Paraguay. This study demonstrates how the adoption of open-source hardware and software offers the flexibility for the wastewater professionals to develop customized DIY solutions for specific monitoring applications and working environments.

Download Full-text

Low-cost Open-source 12-channel MPPT Data Logger for Solar Cell Research

10.1109/pvsc43889.2021.9519025 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Michael D. Kelzenberg ◽

Samuel P. Loke ◽

Harry A. Atwater

Keyword(s):

Solar Cell ◽

Open Source ◽

Low Cost ◽

Data Logger

Download Full-text

Open-source Arduino-compatible data loggers designed for field research

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences ◽

10.5194/hess-23-2065-2019 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 23 (4) ◽

pp. 2065-2076 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Andrew D. Wickert ◽

Chad T. Sandell ◽

Bobby Schulz ◽

Gene-Hua Crystal Ng

Keyword(s):

Open Source ◽

Low Cost ◽

Field Research ◽

Environmental Sensors ◽

Data Logger ◽

Alkaline Batteries ◽

Data Loggers ◽

Open Source Data ◽

Source Data ◽

The Usa

Abstract. Automated electronic data loggers revolutionized environmental monitoring by enabling reliable high-frequency measurements. However, the potential to monitor the complex environmental interactions involved in global change has not been fully realized due to the high cost and lack of modularity of commercially available data loggers. Responding to this need, we developed the ALog (Arduino logger) series of three open-source data loggers, based on the popular and easy-to-program Arduino microcontroller platform. ALog data loggers are low cost, lightweight, and low power; they function between −30 and +60 ∘C, can be powered by readily available alkaline batteries, and can store up to 32 GB of data locally. They are compatible with standard environmental sensors, and the ALog firmware library may be expanded to add additional sensor support. The ALog has measured parameters linked to weather, streamflow, and glacier melt during deployments of days to years at field sites in the USA, Canada, Argentina, and Ecuador. The result of this work is a robust and field-tested open-source data logger that is the direct descendant of dozens of individuals' contributions to the growing open-source electronics movement.

Download Full-text

Gloxinia—An Open-Source Sensing Platform to Monitor the Dynamic Responses of Plants

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s20113055 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 20 (11) ◽

pp. 3055

Author(s):

Olivier Pieters ◽

Tom De Swaef ◽

Peter Lootens ◽

Michiel Stock ◽

Isabel Roldán-Ruiz ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Open Source ◽

Large Scale ◽

Environmental Changes ◽

Low Cost ◽

Current Data ◽

Dynamic Responses ◽

Small Scale ◽

Data Logging ◽

Short Term ◽

Sensing Platforms

The study of the dynamic responses of plants to short-term environmental changes is becoming increasingly important in basic plant science, phenotyping, breeding, crop management, and modelling. These short-term variations are crucial in plant adaptation to new environments and, consequently, in plant fitness and productivity. Scalable, versatile, accurate, and low-cost data-logging solutions are necessary to advance these fields and complement existing sensing platforms such as high-throughput phenotyping. However, current data logging and sensing platforms do not meet the requirements to monitor these responses. Therefore, a new modular data logging platform was designed, named Gloxinia. Different sensor boards are interconnected depending upon the needs, with the potential to scale to hundreds of sensors in a distributed sensor system. To demonstrate the architecture, two sensor boards were designed—one for single-ended measurements and one for lock-in amplifier based measurements, named Sylvatica and Planalta, respectively. To evaluate the performance of the system in small setups, a small-scale trial was conducted in a growth chamber. Expected plant dynamics were successfully captured, indicating proper operation of the system. Though a large scale trial was not performed, we expect the system to scale very well to larger setups. Additionally, the platform is open-source, enabling other users to easily build upon our work and perform application-specific optimisations.

Download Full-text

Open source data logger for low-cost environmental monitoring

Biodiversity Data Journal ◽

10.3897/bdj.2.e1059 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. e1059 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Ed Baker

Keyword(s):

Environmental Monitoring ◽

Open Source ◽

Low Cost ◽

Data Logger ◽

Open Source Data ◽

Source Data

Download Full-text

Low Cost High Altitude Automatic Weather Station Design

Solar Energy and Sustainable Development ◽

10.51646/jsesd.v7i2.70 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Khaled M Dadesh ◽

Saif M Ben Rhouma

Keyword(s):

Wind Speed ◽

High Altitude ◽

Open Source ◽

Meteorological Data ◽

Low Cost ◽

Real Data ◽

Data Logger ◽

Wind Speed Data ◽

Resource Data ◽

Wind Resource

When looking at installing a renewable energy generator, you need to be confident of the resource (solar, wind) at your particular location as this affects the energy generated at the selected site. With solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, this can be done by looking at historic data, generally from satellite readings, for the particular latitude. This will yield pretty accurate resource data. However, the wind resource is incredibly variable and depends upon the exact topology of the area. Houses, trees, and valleys all can affect the local wind resource. For this reason, wind speed data is collected at a potential wind turbine installation site. This gives real data which can be used to assess the wind speed. When installing a number of very expensive large wind turbines, one must be very confident about the wind speed data. The data must be robust and reliable and the developer will be willing to spend a lot of money on accurate industrial equipment to have lots of confidence in the data. This project intends to overcome this barrier by providing a low-cost, reusable, open-source wind speed recording unit, which can be left at high altitude in a remote location to record data and help improve the site’s wind speed assessment. We have proposed and developed a low-cost hardware module based on Arduino open source platform, which measures the meteorological data, including air, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and solar radiation, with two options: The first is the wireless option at which it sends the measured information to Excel spreadsheet running on a PC through wireless link. The second is the data logger option at which it records the measured data to SD card as Excel file with date and time every 10 seconds..

Download Full-text

HIGROTERM: An Open-Source and Low-Cost Temperature and Humidity Monitoring System for Laboratory Applications

Inventions ◽

10.3390/inventions6040084 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (4) ◽

pp. 84

Author(s):

Renan Rocha Ribeiro ◽

Elton Bauer ◽

Rodrigo Lameiras

Keyword(s):

Open Source ◽

Cost Reduction ◽

Low Cost ◽

Sensor Nodes ◽

Real Problem ◽

Data Logging ◽

Bill Of Materials ◽

Temperature And Humidity ◽

The University ◽

Humidity Monitoring

Low-cost electronics developed on easy-to-use prototyping platforms, such as Arduino, are becoming increasingly popular in various fields of science. This article presents an open-source and low-cost eight-channel data-logging system for temperature and humidity monitoring based on DHT22 (AM2302) sensors, named HIGROTERM. The system was designed to solve real needs of the Laboratory of Material Testing of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Brasília. The system design, functionalities, hardware components, source code, bill of materials, assemblage and enclosure are thoroughly described to enable complete reproduction by the interested reader. The terminologies and instructions presented were simplified as much as possible to make it accessible to the greatest extent to researchers from different areas, especially those without electronics background. The data-acquisition system has an estimated total cost of USD 96.00, or USD 136.00 if eight sensor nodes are included, with a considerable margin for cost reduction. The authors expect that the HIGROTERM system may both be a valuable low-cost and customizable tool for the readers, as well a source of innovation and interest in low-cost electronics for real problem-solving in various fields of science.

Download Full-text

Temperature and Heat Flux Data-Logger for Use in Tunnel Ovens: An International Partnered Project

Volume 5: Engineering Education ◽

10.1115/imece2018-86076 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Alexander Watt ◽

Jason Wichert ◽

Justine Staniszewski ◽

Nathaniel Nakles ◽

Yvonne English ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Heat Flux ◽

Engineering Students ◽

Low Cost ◽

Electrical Engineering ◽

General Purpose ◽

Ease Of Use ◽

Maximum Temperature ◽

Data Logging ◽

Data Logger ◽

City College

The Grove City College (GCC) European Study Center (ESC) is a program that allows mechanical and electrical engineering students to study abroad in the junior and senior year fall semester, respectively, and graduate in four years. The ESC is activity partners with a local institution called Oniris, which specializes in food science engineering, and veterinary science (an affiliate with the French Ministry of Agriculture). Electrical engineering students that participate in the program carry out their yearlong capstone design project (Senior Experience in Electrical Design (SEED)) in partnership with Oniris. For the 2016–2017 academic year, participating electrical engineering students completed a project titled Ultra-Low-Cost Flexible Sensor Array, or “Low-Cost Array” (LCA), designed for commercial tunnel-style ovens. The LCA features low cost ($200), flexible programmability, and ease of use (based on the widely available Arduino). The purpose of the project was to develop a low-cost data-logger to operate inside tunnel-style ovens to record temperature from thermocouples (and other analog signals, i.e. heat flux) for thirty minutes in an environment up to 250 °C. This study evaluates the LCA compared to other data-logging systems, and its performance in high temperature environments by a series of experiments. In addition, an idea of its commercialization potential was explored by interviewing industrialists and academics on-site. Experimental results showed that: (1) data logged from the system were close to values recorded by current systems used for both temperature and heat flux measurements, and (2) the system performed well at 240 °C for thirty minutes (maximum temperature of oven). In addition, the interviews revealed that although most interest was in a tunnel-style oven data-logger, it seems feasible to incorporate changes to satisfy needs for other markets, especially those of a general-purpose data-logger.

Download Full-text

Portable ECG System Design Using the AD8232 Microchip and Open-Source Platform

Proceedings ◽

10.3390/ecsa-6-06584 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 49

Author(s):

Miguel Bravo-Zanoguera ◽

Daniel Cuevas-González ◽

Juan P. García-Vázquez ◽

Roberto L. Avitia ◽

M. A. Reyna

Keyword(s):

Open Source ◽

Printed Circuit Board ◽

Analog Circuit ◽

Circuit Board ◽

System Stability ◽

Electrical Safety ◽

Analog Filters ◽

Ecg Signal ◽

Data Logging ◽

Data Logger

This paper presents the design of a portable electrocardiograph (ECG) device using the AD8232 microchip as the analog front-end (AFE). Starting with the manufacturer’s evaluation board of the AFE chip for testing circuit configurations, open-source hardware and software components were integrated into a breadboard prototype. Ultimately, a custom printed circuit board (PCB) was produced. The prototype required to accommodate the microchip on a SMD-to-DIP adapter for testing with the breadboard-friendly Arduino microcontroller alongside a data logger and a Bluetooth breakout board. The analog ECG signal from the AFE output was digitized using one channel of the 10-bit analog-to-digital Converter (ADC) of the ATmega328 microcontroller contained in the Arduino Nano board. The digitized ECG signal can be transmitted not only by serial cable using the Arduino functions, but also via Bluetooth to a PC or to an Android smartphone system when the HC-06 shield is used. The data logging shield provides gigabytes of storage, and the signal is recorded to a micro SD card adapter along with the date and time stamp data of the sample capture (real-time clock provided). In addition to hardware and software development, a simulation was used in the analog circuit design with SPICE Multisim software and the related macromodel library to assess system stability. Besides the analog filters in the AFE stage, digital filtering by means of simple difference equations was investigated. A menu was incorporated to choose from the several modes of operation of the device. The ECG test signals were obtained from a patient simulator (SimCube) and real patients. A portable ECG system for monitoring applications that complies with electrical safety regulations and medical equipment design was realized.

Download Full-text

Research on a Low-Cost, Open-Source, and Remote Monitoring Data Collector to Predict Livestock’s Habits Based on Location and Auditory Information: A Case Study from Vietnam

Agriculture ◽

10.3390/agriculture10050180 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (5) ◽

pp. 180 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Ha Quang Thinh Ngo ◽

Thanh Phuong Nguyen ◽

Hung Nguyen

Keyword(s):

Open Source ◽

Real Time ◽

High Speed ◽

High Reliability ◽

Low Cost ◽

Monitoring Data ◽

Farm Animals ◽

Auditory Information ◽

Fast Tracking ◽

Data Collector

The supervision and feeding of grazing livestock are always difficult missions. Since animals act based on habits, the real-time monitoring data logger has become an indispensable instrument to assist farmers in recognizing the status of livestock. Position-tracked and acoustic monitoring have become commonplace as two of the best methods to characterize feeding performance in ruminants. Previously, the existing methods were limited to desktop computers and lacked a sound-collecting function. These restrictions impacted the late interventions from feeders and required a large-sized data memory. In this work, an open-source framework for a data collector that autonomously captures the health information of farm animals is introduced. In this portable hardware, a Wireless Location Acoustic Sensing System (WiLASS) is integrated to infer the health status through the activities and abnormal phenomena of farming livestock via chew–bite sound identification. WiLASS involves the open modules of ESP32-WROOM, GPS NEO-6M, ADXL335 accelerometer, GY-MAX4466 amplifier, temperature sensors, and other signal processing circuits. By means of wireless communication, the ESP32-WROOM Thing micro-processor offers high speed transmission, standard protocol, and low power consumption. Data are transferred in a real-time manner from the attached sensing modules to a digital server for further analysis. The module of GPS NEO-6M Thing brings about fast tracking, high precision, and a strong signal, which is suitable for highland applications. Some computations are incorporated into the accelerometer to estimate directional movement and vibration. The GY-MAX4466 Thing plays the role of microphone, which is used to store environmental sound. To ensure the quality of auditory data, they are recorded at a minimum sampling frequency of 10 KHz and at a 12-bit resolution. Moreover, a mobile software in pocket devices is implemented to provide extended mobility and social convenience. Converging with a cloud-based server, the multi-Thing portable platform can provide access to simultaneously supervise. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol with low bandwidth, high reliability, and bi-direction, and which is appropriate for most operating systemsOS, is embedded into the system to prevent data loss. From the experimental results, the feasibility, effectiveness, and correctness of our approach are verified. Under the changes of climate, the proposed framework not only supports the improvement of farming techniques, but also provides a high-quality alternative for poor rural areas because of its low cost and its ability to carry out a proper policy for each species.

Download Full-text

Fabricating a Portable ECG Device Using AD823X Analog Front-End Microchips and Open-Source Development Validation

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s20205962 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 20 (20) ◽

pp. 5962

Author(s):

Miguel Bravo-Zanoguera ◽

Daniel Cuevas-González ◽

Marco A. Reyna ◽

Juan P. García-Vázquez ◽

Roberto L. Avitia

Keyword(s):

Open Source ◽

Circuit Board ◽

System Stability ◽

Electrical Safety ◽

Ecg Signal ◽

Data Logging ◽

Data Logger ◽

Front End ◽

Analog Front End ◽

Open Source Development

Relevant to mobile health, the design of a portable electrocardiograph (ECG) device using AD823X microchips as the analog front-end is presented. Starting with the evaluation board of the chip, open-source hardware and software components were integrated into a breadboard prototype. This required modifying the microchip with the breadboard-friendly Arduino Nano board in addition to a data logger and a Bluetooth breakout board. The digitized ECG signal can be transmitted by serial cable, via Bluetooth to a PC, or to an Android smartphone system for visualization. The data logging shield provides gigabytes of storage, as the signal is recorded to a microSD card adapter. A menu incorporates the device’s several operating modes. Simulation and testing assessed the system stability and performance parameters in terms of not losing any sample data throughout the length of the recording and finding the maximum sampling frequency; and validation determined and resolved problems that arose in open-source development. Ultimately, a custom printed circuit board was produced requiring advanced manufacturing options of 2.5 mils trace widths for the small package components. The fabricated device did not degrade the AD823X noise performance, and an ECG waveform with negligible distortion was obtained. The maximum number of samples/second was 2380 Hz in serial cable transmission, whereas in microSD recording mode, a continuous ECG signal for up to 36 h at 500 Hz was verified. A low-cost, high-quality portable ECG for long-term monitoring prototype that reasonably complies with electrical safety regulations and medical equipment design was realized.

Download Full-text