IOT based water flow meter using ThingSpeak

Abstract

The Large scale manufacturing companies are fully automated. Soft Drink Industries and Chemical industries have to constantly measure and quantify the liquids that they are handling during this automation process, and the most common sensor used to measure the flow of a liquid is a Flow Sensor. By using a flow sensor with a microcontroller like NodeMCU, we can calculate the flow rate, and check the volume of liquid that has passed through a pipe, and control it as required. Apart from manufacturing industries, flow sensors can also be found in the agriculture sector, food processing, water management, mining industry, water recycling, coffee machines etc. Further, a water flow sensor will be a good addition to projects like Automatic water dispenser and smart irrigation systems where we need to monitor and control the flow of liquids. In this project, we are going to build a water flow meter using NodeMCU. We will interface the water flow sensor with NodeMCU and LCDI2C, and program it to display the volume of water, which has passed through the valve. For this particular project, we are going to use the YF-S201 water flow sensor, which uses a hall effect to sense the flow rate of the liquid. The measured values are also communicated to the ThingSpeak cloud. The parameters can be monitored remotely form any part of the world. When the volume exceeds the threshold value, Thingspeak will activate the Thingspeak react to send a message to the responsible person with help of the IFTTT applet.