John (@Farmgeek) Hart has built an Arduino powered wireless (wifi) water tank measuring rig that takes a measurement and sends the results 300m back to his warm cosy home where it get graphed in all its splendid glory (we all love graphs right?).
It's a stunning display of a set of simple solutions to what seems like a complex and daunting project - it's also something that I've been asked about by MindKits customers frequently. So, here's the solution to dry tanks, cold walks out to measure water levels and global warming.
From the site:
"Back at the end of 2009 I started playing about with an Arduino solution to monitor the water level in a water tank about 300m from the house. The tank isn’t visible from the house so a standard visual tank indicator wouldn’t work. In a nutshell, this sensor measures resistance through an array submerged in the tank to determine the water level, then sends that data back to a server in the house for humans to read. I covered the prototype and the first iteration of the sensor in this post. There were a few more steps beyond the prototype required to make it really useful and along the way I discovered some issues with the first model which I’ve improved on, but that’s why you call it a prototype."
