The aim of this project is to create a real-time flood monitoring drifter in association with the UQ Aquatic Research Group. These drifters would be used during flood events to closely monitor channel erosion (in South East Queensalnd) and the movement of soil from catchment areas down to Morton Bay.
The monitoring data provided by the drifter such as turbidity and location, is crucial for deploying good mitigation strategies.
The app was developed on Zephyr V2.6.X. Newer versions of Zephyr may not be compatible due to upstream changes.
west build -p
west flash #J-linkThe device is equipped with a shell and logging through USB. It can be accessed over micro usb with any PC, on linux the use the following to open a session
screen /dev/ttyACMX 115200
Shell allows for specific commands to be issued to the device for debugging/testing purposes. Logging will show any crucial errors/issues.
The drifter once it has established a network LTE-M1 connection will slowly blink green (status led), if the device is not connected or is attemting to connect, it will blink the red status led.
The drifter will stream data to a public channel on ThingSpeak using MQTT. Due to the bandwidth limit restrictions imposed by thingspeak IO (Packet/15 Seconds), the drifter sends a '#' delimited string of data of the following format [turbidity#lattitude#longitude]. This can be viewed at the following link:
Clicking on 'export recent data', then 'JSON' is the easiest way of watching the data received onto the server.
The output stream from the drifter can also be viewed using the GUI, it shows a recent history (last 10 updates) from the drifter and the ability to locate the device based on its last known location using google maps (click the locate button).
The drifter was deployed on the 1/12/2021 and was successfully recovered on the 2/12/2021. The following images show deployment adventures of the drifter!
