Conference Proceedings (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/770

Browse

Browsing Conference Proceedings (Electrical and Electronic Engineering) by Subject "Data logger"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Design and development of a satellite based water resources monitoring system
    (2014-12) Mafukidze, Harry; Wolhuter, Riian
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The Faculty of Forestry and Woodscience at Stellenbosch University has a requirement to monitor and record water resources and environmental data at remote sites, not within reach of any mobile services. The current solution consists of a standalone data logger based monitoring system. This system, however, is not ideal as it does not provide data in real time and has high costs and other problems servicing the particular sites. This paper presents an alternative satellite based WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) solution to this problem. The system described in this paper comprises a WSN with a three-part framework. The first part consists of sensor nodes monitoring rainfall, air temperature, air humidity, ambient light, wind speed, wind direction, soil temperature and soil moisture. Communication from these nodes to the central gateway is based in the wireless ISM band. The second part contains an Iridium satellite communications module, a gateway with a Linux based SBC (Single Board Computer) for collecting, storing and sending data from sensor nodes and forwarding such data via the SBD (Short Burst Data) satellite messaging service. The third part consists of the MS (Master Station), which is used for displaying sensory and site information. The system is solar powered and measurements indicate that the system meets an overall standby time of at least three days, as stated in the project requirements. It has been tested continuously in an actual deployment situation and is performing well. This new satellite based monitoring system is certainly an improvement and a reliable alternative to the one used up to now.