In November of 2018 the city hall of the city launched a challenge. Create smart solutions to help the city get better response in times of heavy rain.
There were 2 weeks of competition in which 240 were enrolled in the selection process. The process was tapering to 40 people and of these 40 were created 10 groups with 4 people and the days went by until there were 5 groups and in the end there were 3 groups winning the competition. I Marcelo is one of the winning groups.
Our solution was to create a network of sensors scattered throughout the city of Rio de Janeiro with the ability to measure levels of flooding, temperature, humidity and pressure.
Our system will have a dashboard that will inform the city hall in real time about the weather conditions of each neighborhood and the levels of waterlogging and drainage.
You will also have a mobile application to interact with the citizen.
In the application the citizen will be informed of the weather and weather and also the possibility of rain and possible flooding in their surroundings.
We are in the final stage of prototyping of our sensor and for the next month of February will be held our MVP.
So I would like to be sharing with you all this wonderful project of which I am part and having the opportunity to take LoRaWan technology to the City Hall of Rio de Janeiro.
Below is a video that we did explaining our solution.
Hi @balisteri, Great to hear you have made progress in Rio.
I spent several years on Flood Network with various technologies, but LoRaWAN has enabled it to work as I first imagined. Now we can buy off-the-shelf hardware we can put together a solution for customers quickly. This also means people can just choose off the shelf hardware and build it themselves, so the value is really in how you use and present that data, or streamline the installation process.
Of course there are lots of things to learn about sensor deployment, placement, regulations and even about the data itself, so the experience we built up over the years is still very valuable.
Happy to talk more about our experiences and other opportunities. Send me a DM here and we can chat.
I’m very much interested in what you’ve done. I am working on something similar, I think. I live in southeast Texas, where flooding has become a serious issue due to overdevelopment of land and no expansion of the natural (mostly) drainage channels. The county has some expensive data gathering equipment, but it is sparsely located and many tributaries have no equipment. There is little chance that our local town government and/or the county is going to do anything to aid my project, so I’m looking for inexpensive, non-invasive ways to measure water levels, and idealy I’d like to calculate the actual flow volume.
On March 25, Startup Noah installed the prototype of a SENSOR that has the ability to accurately monitor the level of flooding, ambient temperature and the moment a rain starts.
It is installed in the neighborhood of Catete which is a region that has a long history of flooding since the time of the ball poles.
Below is how the Noah Intelligent Platform for Flood Monitoring should work.
1 - Sensors installed at the top of the poles continuously measure the level of the water column, temperature and the moment the rain starts and identifies and alerts when the level of flooding changes.
2 - Each sensor is connected to an embedded board, placed at the top of the pole at an approximate height of 7 meters in height.
3 - The boards communicate with a base station using low power wireless technology and long distance “LoRa” communication. The maximum distance of up to 5 km.
4 - The data are sent through the LoRa Transmission Stations and are converted to the IP network layer and transmitted to a data cloud, where forecasts are made and generated flood level alerts for the Rio de Janeiro Operations Center and the population.
These data serve to assist the decision-making process for the Operations Center and feed the population on flooded regions and possible displacement routes.
Hi BoRRoZ, Is that okay? Yes this sensor can be used in the TTN or in a Private LoRa Network. It is a prototype and has now been installed for testing and possible fixes. As I said in other posts I work in a university that is a PUC Rio and here we have a lorawan network for the campus that was implemented and is maintained by me and here our gateway is connected to TTN. That is all the development of this sensor was over the TTN network. Today at the place where it is installed that is another Neighborhood far from here unfortunately does not have a TTN network available and we are using the Americam Tower network that has coverage throughout Rio de Janeiro.
