Transformation of an Offline to an IoT-based Real-time River Water Quality Monitoring System

Abstract

This paper presents the design for upgrading an offline river water quality monitoring system to an IoT-based real-time system. The design is to be applied to offline river water quality monitoring units that are currently being installed for monitoring the quality of the river. These units can perform water quality measurement and record the results in the internal data storage. In order to collect this data, manual data transfer at the monitoring location is mandatory, leading to inefficiency due to the time and cost required. Furthermore, with manual data collection, real-time monitoring and response can hardly be achieved. Specifically, our design first obtains analog measurement results from the current monitoring unit and converts them into digital signals using Modbus remote IO M160 module. These signals are then fed to a Raspberry Pi. These results are then stored in both the Raspberry Pi internal storage and the cloud server for further uses. The database and visualization on Raspberry Pi is developed using real-time MongoDB and Node-Red while InfluxDB and Grafana are being used as the database and visualizer on the cloud server, respectively. Our design also includes notification through LINE application for urgent alerts. With our design, the real-time online water quality tracking is possible without system replacement.