water tank level sensing

Forum rules

Questions about hardware that can be controlled by Indigo (but not through the interfaces and plugins listed). If Indigo doesn't support some bit of hardware you're interested in, and you don't find a 3rd Party Plugin for it, add it to this forum. Be sure to include links to as much information as you can find about it.

Note: adding it here does not mean we're going to add it - in fact it's possible one of our 3rd party developers may decide to write a plugin for it. We add hardware/features based on a lot of different factors beyond just having a request for it.

Posted on
Mon Jun 20, 2022 2:35 am
agame offline
Posts: 514
Joined: Jul 13, 2017
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: water tank level sensing

just fyi I'm pleased to advise the 24volt pressure sensor spec sheet (according to google translate) confirms these are 24volt nominal, but gives a power supply range of 12-36v.
I ordered one from AU stock out of impatience, where i could only fine 24volt spec'd devices, a few more still on the way from China.

Posted on
Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:02 am
agame offline
Posts: 514
Joined: Jul 13, 2017
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: water tank level sensing

just [hopefully!] closing off this thread: finally implemented GlennNZ's suggestion and working beautifully. fingers crossed!

I would caution anyone to expect loads of config issues in node-red and if all fails recreate a new indigo device once you are certain of the correct MQTT Shims config (this delayed me several hours!....but I cant recreate,...).

Posted on
Sun Jul 24, 2022 8:12 pm
GlennNZ offline
User avatar
Posts: 1555
Joined: Dec 07, 2014
Location: Central Coast, Australia

Re: water tank level sensing

Hope it continues to go well.

Do you have any pointers/links for setting up node-Red/ESP32 and connection to sensor?. I may simplify and move in that direction down the track, or as a side project ( when need a side project!)

Thanks

Posted on
Sun Jul 24, 2022 11:05 pm
agame offline
Posts: 514
Joined: Jul 13, 2017
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: water tank level sensing

My flow is actually using pressure sensor> ADS115/i2c>RaspberryPi >Node-Red > MQTT > Indigo/MQTT/Shims....So no ESP/32s involved. (I thought you were also using this approach?).

The NCD ADS1115 sensors are hooked to RPis which are running node-red, and communicating with an mqtt server i have running on the Indigo mac (though of course this could be running anywhere - but i have it running for Shellies and a couple of other projects). Currently this is working on two different RPis, monitoring two and one tank respectively. One RPi is a 3 and one a Zero.

Using the NCD sensors makes this somewhat simpler as they have published node-red nodes for all their devices. These are available in the palette, however for some reason I had to uninstall and reinstall the NCD nodes via npm, and then do an npm rebuild before the ADS1115 would connect. I managed to connect with a generic ADS1115 node before getting the NCD nodes working.

The NCD node and hardware info is here:

https://flows.nodered.org/node/ncd-red-ads1115

Installing the NCD-red-ads1115 node is meant to automatically install a configuration node (NCD-red-comm) that handles the i2c communications. In my case this was not installing happily.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ncd-red-comm

Posted on
Mon Jul 25, 2022 2:35 am
GlennNZ offline
User avatar
Posts: 1555
Joined: Dec 07, 2014
Location: Central Coast, Australia

Re: water tank level sensing

Thanks!

I’m not completely loosing it - hopefully! - but sorry for confusing you.

Yes I use RPI and NCD ADS1115 with pressure sensor. I’m using pibeacon with sensor to read level.

Was thinking about simple=better and considering ESP32 devices (have setup a few lately with WLED and found it easy) with NodeRed. Your mention of nodeRED reminded me. Figured this might be simplest - forget that was my musing rather than what you had done….


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Posted on
Mon Jul 25, 2022 7:39 pm
agame offline
Posts: 514
Joined: Jul 13, 2017
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: water tank level sensing

ah! that makes more sense lol.
I haven't thus far played with a 'raw' ESP but I am increasingly impressed with MQTT - anything that builds on that architecture makes a lot of sense to me. And having MQTT Explorer for debugging is great.
And with RPis virtually unobtainable at the minute....

Posted on
Tue Aug 30, 2022 1:08 am
agame offline
Posts: 514
Joined: Jul 13, 2017
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: water tank level sensing

in case anyone else is going down this track, especially if challenged by WIFI range, I just got one of these pressure sensors working on a Dragino LT Lora I/O controller. I'm getting at least 500m range through forest (supposedly 10km+ clear line of sight).

Image

I'm running my own Chirpstack gateway on a RPi, however if you're in range of TTN or Helium, you don't even need that to get going. The devices are not much over US$50.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests