iot help

judeboy101

hi all

one of the lads in my school wants to make an an IOT that connects a flowmeter sensor through the WiFi to an app. I'm clueless on the tech end but I can order what ever he needs. Anyone have any idea how to go about this. He can make apps but its the physical tech he cant do

thanks

Keplar240B

Arduino is a Italian company that make a family of microntrollers that are relativity user friendly. The software is open source & free to download , the hardware is cheap, open source, modular and available and there is a great community support on forums and videos available on line. They are probable (IMO limited experience) the easiest cheapest way to get into IOT
Here's the Arduino website, it has a forum where you can search for similar projects
http://forum.arduino.cc


The most common Arduino and one most people start out with is the is the Arduino UNO
You can then buy a WIFI shield(shields are what arduino called expansion boards) for this
Slot your WIFI shield onto the UNO
Then the flowmeter now I never used one of these but what you want to find is a arduino compatible one that meets whatever your spec is so I typed "arduino flowmeter" ebay i listed a Uk seller, I assume it will do what you want to do you will have to look into that, search for "arduino flow meter" into youtube and the arduino site




Parts
Arduino UNO 9 euro
http://www.adverts.ie/other-electronics/arduino-uno-compatible-board/7301242
ESP-12E Wifi Shield for Arduino 14 euro
http://www.adverts.ie/other-electronics/esp-12e-wifi-shield-for-arduino/8812956
Water Flow Sensor 1/2" Fluid Flowmeter Switch Counter 1-30L/min Meter NEW 10 euro
http://www.ebay.ie/itm/Water-Flow-Sensor-1-2-Fluid-Flowmeter-Switch-Counter-1-30L-min-Meter-NEW-/161783829929?hash=item25ab1155a9:g:FGAAAOSwPcVVwB3Q

You can find these arduino stuff cheaper on ebay and elsewhere and you can also use a smaller arduino and smaller wifi module as well to shrink the project in space and money if that's an issue. The flowmeter I don't know about.

This is pretty cool project idea actually, people could monitor there water usage on Wifi,
maybe there is a commercial off the shelf product available

Heres a project here
https://plot.ly/arduino/water-flow-tutorial/

DublinDilbert

The arduino route isn't a bad one to go down. There are a few other options like the raspberry pi with a wifi dongle.

One little device that might be even easier to use is the spark core https://www.particle.io . Thus can be programmed online via a browser on thier site. When the unit connects via wifi if there's new code available it pulls it down. I've see people up and running in less than an hour with these at hackatons.

Big Lar

I have a flowmeter connected to a Arduino here that calculates water usage, the Arduino connects and uploads data to thingseak and then a simple web interface to read the data from thingspeak. There is also a thingspeak read API key that your buddy could use in his app.
Thing about the flow meter I use is that it works on interrupts as it takes a reading eveytime that the little fan inside the fitting turns, then every 5 mins it connects to thingspeak which takes about 20-30 seconds and during that time there is no sensor reading which does not really bother me but I dunno how accurate you want your reading.

The flow meter calculates field 4 on the charts.
https://thingspeak.com/channels/40150

syklops

IOT is Internet of Things. He doesnt want to build an IoT, he wants to build a Thing of the Intrnet so ToI? Just a side observation.

I don't know how adept your friend is at electronics and programing but in my experience a Raspberry Pi would be the easiest route. It has a GPIO for adding sensors and the logic can be programmed with Python, an easier language to get started with than C. If the goal is to have a working prototype Id go with that and you will still learn lots, but I would never discourage learning C, and I would definitely recommend getting an arduino to play with.