NJIT Smart Water Monitoring System

Overview

This is a project by the { insert Team here } of the {insert course num.} class. To deliver a means of consistently instrumenting water data for a span of at least 3 months. In order to accomplish this task, the following components were identified:

• Sensor Gateway: Acts as a gathering point for a set of sensors. Data is received, batched, and serialized here. This sends the serialized data to another device acting as an Internet Gateway.

• Internet Gateway: Acts as the host of any server-side web workers, and the broker for sending / receiving data to/from third party services. This receives serialized data from the sensor gateway, deserializes it into a programmable object, and fans out deconstructed copies of the object to outside services.

• Data Storage Blob: Pretty much any server / service that can hold large binary objects. Data here will be accessed by our apps, services, and interested third parties

System Outline

Now that we have classified the main types of actors in our system; let's match them up with corresponding devices:

Hardware

• Sensor Gateway: Arduino UNO + Sensors( list here )
• Internet Gateway: Raspberry Pi 3
• Data Storage Blob: Azure IoT Hub

Software

• Sensor Gateway:
  • Python 3.x
  • requests library
  • Arduino library
• Internet Gateway:
  • MonaServer
  • Lua 5.2.x
  • Luarocks

System at Face Value

Now that we ironed out a light bill of materials, let's get into describing how our system's interactions are organized:

Reality -> Sensor Gateway

• Each Arduino Uno is connected to a mesh of the following sensors:
  • Sensor A
  • SensorB
  • Sensor X
• A long-running python script listens for raw sensor streams, packages them as a multiplexed, serialized data object, and sends it to the Raspberry Pi Monaserver for further processing

Sensor Gateway -> Internet Gateway

• The Python script in the Sensor Gateway caches and sends serialized data stream objects to the Internet Gateway over a Layer 7 protocol( HTTP )
• The Internet Gateway receives the data stream over HTTP, de-serializing the data for post-processing
• The Internet Gateway then selects a Cloud Service to send a serialized, updated copy of the Data Stream to, in the form of a machine-readable file

Internet Gateway -> Cloud Services( e.g. Data Blob Storage )

• After selecting a relevant list of Cloud Services, the Internet Gateway prepares to send out messages, encapsulating copies of the Data Stream object
• Upon properly validating and preparing the Data Stream object copies, the Internet Gateway sends the serialized copies to endpoints of each listed Cloud Service
• The Cloud Service logs these activities for administrative observation.

Getting Started with Development