Energy harvesting wireless sensor node for monitoring of surface water

Monitoring of surface water areas before, during and after the flood is important to collect useful information for future risk assessment and for the purpose of learning about future preventive measures. This paper describes the development of the wireless sensor network (WSN) node capable of collecting water level measurement data on remote locations that are covered by surface waters, either by flooding or seasonal environmental impacts. Our main goal was to create a flexible, easy-to-deploy and easy-to-maintain, adaptable, low-cost and low power WSN node for monitoring of water level. Measuring node is based on the ultra low power components, with the most important MSP430 series microcontroller and radio frequency (RF) module based on nRFf24l01+ integrated circuit. Each node contains energy harvesting subsystem and supercapacitor for energy storage. Water level measurement is performed by a separate module, which is based on PIC12F1822 microcontroller that supports small capacitance measurements. Water level measurement results for different situations were collected, analyzed and graphically presented.