My Submission Is the Pool Monitor Project. I Have Recently Had an In-Ground Pool Installed

POOL MONITOR

My submission is the "Pool Monitor" project. I have recently had an in-ground pool installed at our new home here in SC. The pool company instructed me on how to measure the water's PH level using a PH test kit which includes vials and chemicals. Instead of needing to go out to the pool on a repeated basis to measure the PH with these chemicals, I thought it would be nice to be able to view the PH level on my phone or PC. When I read about the contest, I thought the MKR1000 would be the perfect solution since it contains a microcontroller and WiFi radio all on one board. While I was putting the parts together for this project I came across a water-proof temperature sensor and thought that would also be a great piece of information to view along with the PH readings. The temperature data is also incorporated into the PH measurement to account for temperature effects of the PH sensor. This should give me a very accurate reading. Because of the short deadline to get this project completed, I opted to use off the shelf parts and a perf board to construct this project. I placed the circuitry into a “water resistant” plastic case. I’m hoping this will work long term sitting out in the weather (next to the pool). While the pool monitor is running, it periodically sends UDP broadcast messages onto my WiFi network for anyone to view. When the pool monitor is not sending UDP data, it is placed into sleep mode. I have discovered that placing the microcontroller into sleep mode doesn’t power-down the WiFi radio and thus will kill a 2000mAh battery in less than 24 hours. So for now, I am repurposing a phone charger as the power source until I can find a way to turn off the radio during sleep mode. The other item I would like to compete eventually is placing the data onto Microsoft Azure and then develop a phone app to pull down historical measurements and plot the data. For now, I am using a free application that will display UDP data on the screen in real time. When I get the radio issue figured out and Azure, I will then turn back the UDP update rate to once per hour. This should give me several months of battery life using my Li-Poly battery.