Sentient Things is using their IoT platform to measure and report tides in real time. Robert Mawrey provides a detailed tutorial on how to build your own solar-powered weather and tide monitoring system on hackster.io. The system measures water height along with wind speed, water temperature, air temperature, and atmospheric pressure and sends it via cellular to a ThingsSpeak dashboard. Live data is here.
Tide Data on Thingspeak
According to Mawrey, the average distance between tide stations in the US is 100 miles meaning reported local tide levels are often predictions instead of real data. In inlets and bays, these predictions can be wrong and can lead to bad decisions around navigation and flooding.
Some of the key components of the system are:
- Sentient Things IoT Node
- Sentient Things Level Adapter
- Particle Boron
- Maxbotix MB7389
- Lithium Ion Battery Pack
- Voltaic 9 Watt Solar Panel
Tide Station Assembly Overview
Mawrey created a tide gauge in 2017. Besides being solar powered, this update improves accuracy (by detecting false outliers), adds weather data that is relevant to tidal surge forecasting, and reports tide levels relative to mean lower low water (MLLW) levels.
Deploying the tide sensor on a dock.
Tide monitoring system collecting readings.
If you would like help designing a solar powered IoT system, please reach out for a consultation.
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