im just wondering if theres a way to see hom many mbps my disk is transferring. maybe use a stress test tool to see max speed and comapair it to what is running on the system generally. im thinking i need to upgrade the system because it is going to be doing a very important job for the small city of barnard missouri by monitering the water tower sto see when its filled and i cant have it delaying a message to reciever for 30 minutes like it does with some tasks. also cpu and memory never max out it gets a load of about 3.5 the highest ive seen not always like that. i tried some hard drive tools via addon but it just give me error 200 and cant find the drive on it. rpi4b with extrenal ssd samsung drive. just need an opinion from anyone about 45 wifi devices also google is hooked up to its with assistants and email service roku duckdns lets encrypt mqtt zigbee6 zwave2 motioneye 4cam also go2rtc 1 camera onvif nmap tracker upnp/igd ring googlecast sun sensor and a bunch of other stuff
I would not put an important sensor on a HA installation running all the other stuff you do.
Split it out to another installation with only the sensor for the water tower and let the original installation handle the other parts.
alright well i hate to say this but the sensor is only a binary sensor. so what the do is turn on the water for the town and then drive by the water tower and see if its overflowing and if it is they shut it off. so my solution is to make it happen faster. they wasted 75000 gallons of water in a month doing it this way. we get ours from maryville mo thats 15 minutes away. we get charged $10 for a 1000 gallons so they have wasted $750 in that month of a town of only 140 people last time i checked. my solution was to use a walkie talkie and make it talk to a esp8266 device using a key, if the message repeats 7 seconds for 3 times the lock is unlocked and sends a message to turn off the water and then my system turns it into a text message to get them to do it but its not been implemented yet waiting on a 80yr old guys free time… the thing i made was some cheap parts and some junk i had laying around but its better then their methods of doing this. love the advice pushing me closer to just upgrading. i appreate the advice it is a federally protected water tower.
I can not really comprehend how the setup is.
Where is the valve placed in relation to the water tower?
What kind of communication are possible? LoRa, WiFi, Internet, Mobile phone?
Interesting.
I am reading your writing and what I gather is that
- the water tower has a binary sensor indicating tower is full or not.
- there is some sort of a valve that needs to be actuated to open or close the inlet to the tower.
- the goal is to not automate the shutoff, but to send notification to someone who may or may not be available to shut the valve off.
The technology is not your issue but getting the township to accept the technology.
Industrial solutions exists that can be used on the cheap to fully automate this, while retaining manual over-ride ability.
I suggest you present a full system that takes the sensor information, operates the valve fully automatically.
Personally, I would set it to send a notification that the fill valve was shut off, not that it needs to be shut off. Then, once the sensor sends the new signal (water level dropped), open fill valve, send notification that the fill valve was opened. I would also add a secondary sensor on the overflow that communicates independently from the first sensor. If the first binary sensor fails, there is no way for it to be detected.
If the human wants to interfere with valve activation they can get to the tower and do so.
Qs:
- what kind of signal the binary sensor sends?
- Where is the shut off valve located?
- Where is the overflow located?
I will assume there is a mechanical room at the base of the water tower, for pump and such for power, correct?(Standard water tower base)What is the exact coordinates of the water tower so we can look at distances and topology?(40°10’51"N 94°49’10"W on WW, between 1st and 370th sts)
I would put the sensors and such in the mechanical room.
I would send the sensor information and action notification back to a base station. How, besides fully authenticated and encrypted, depends what is at the base station. (direcitonal WiFi, LoRaWAN, sigfox, NB-IoT, Z-Wave, Sub-GHZ like 433 or 915MHz, even GSM/PRRS module)
Looking at the tower, I am baffled how this tower was installed without an overflow valve trigger.
this is where the manual valve is located to turn on water to fill the tower
this is the tower no pump no regulater also a hole in overflow the overflow is left of the door locations are on the pics also looks like someone shat a little on the bottem of the ball part the the 50million $ thing also froze up last winter the reason none of the normal stuff was installed is 1 were a small town and 2 it was installed before we switched from well water to the next towns over maryvilles rural water and they never installed the equipment to make it right for some reason…
so i didnt want to climb the water tower to work on this concoction i made so this is a enamal pan with a float sensor im going to take advantage of the hole inside the overflow pipe inside the water tower by taking some plastic wrap and a clothes hanger and clamping it to where the hole is and running it down into this pan because water has gravity and if i give it a path to follow it will go right where i want it to this isnt set up yet as im waiting on the old guy to get up there for some reason my neighbor who does water bills want him to be there the guy who reads the meters and works on stuff as well as fixing and uncloging things there is also a ceramic candle heater for the winter this also self resets via the hole i drilled into the bottom of the pan its gonnas be on a half cinder block with one inside it and one on top of the lid that i drilled a hole in because i figured out a glitch if the float bobs 2 times in less then 2 seconds it cause the countdown relay to not work and the whole thing dont work so the cinderblock inside is a wave break for the float
so the pan with a float is connected to the end of what used to be a rainsensor to turn on a walkie talkie and using a repeating countdown timer on basuically a egift card reader to say (automated message the water tower is full please shut it off repeating) due to a inrush current problem with one of the relays i used to turn the button on for the walkie talkie it glitches out the number of cycles in the countdown relay so it was originally set to 200 but now runs indefinatly because the glitch resets the cycles so in the case of my stuff goes down they can hear the walkie talkie go off using another walkie talkie
the reciever is another walkie talkie using a 120w mono amplifier a relay for some reason this works i dont know how or why but it worked and i was tired of messing with it (yes i know anyone can buy a walkie talkie and occupy this line so how do i know if its the water tower because this is also a binary sensor) so the message is 7 seconds long stops for 1 second and repeats so if the signal repeats 3 times for 7 seconds i know its the water tower because who talks for 7 seconds and repeats 3 times the relay has 3 wires positive negitive and signal so when the walkie talkie activates the relay switches poles to give a high signal (also i put the reciever high up on my wall in case i got drunk i wouldnt fall into it and break it)
the 3 wire from the relay on the walkie talkie go to this esp8266 which is my hallway light connected to pir a dht11 it also senses if my water heater is turned on using binary sensor and its also ran to a ds19b20 that goes to my dishwasher i got tired of it not working the way i wanted so i rewired it with a esp12f this esp8266 in the picture goes to home assistant that tell it to send the text message using the conditions i mentioned above email to text (also i didnt use a rain sensor because it corrodes very quicky due to electrolysis ) i also forgot to mention the hole so by the time they realize its overflowing alot of water is going inside before some of it its going outside only the water tower is locked i can go turn the water on right now if i wanna or shut it off its a small town 140 people so everyones got everyones back if i wanted i could go borrow anything probably from anyone in this town later on i plan on making it fully automated using more walkie talkies and relays and stuff like that i tested it in the bathtub a bunch one of the reasons i wanted to do this is because when i moved in the bill was 40 minimum for water now its $120 and prolly gonna get higher if i dont help fix this another reason i wanted to do this because if i host this service i can maybe hopefully get a discount on my water they also want to put me on the water department after i demonstrated this to them so thats more money for me easy job just gotta fix my stuff if it breaks and maybe some other stuff. i plan to fully automate this but first i gotta get them to save some money to do it and i wanna be the guy to do it im probably the dumb smart guy trying to do stuff.
Only if it is a resistive sensors.
The capacitive sensors do not need contact with the fluid.
Definitely very interesting solution.
I would approach it by breaking the project down into a bit more structured way and then I will be able to “swap” in and out various solution for each segment
I still would consider automating the valve shut off and possibly opening.
you have four possible states
111 valve open, tower overflow, tower full
110 valve open, tower overflow, tower not full
100 valve open, tower not overflow, tower not full
000 valve closed, tower not overflow, tower not full
Looking at the pictures and maps there seems to be around 700m between the valve and the tower, so communication reliability have to thought into any solution suggested. 
The current setup is really DIY and I totally agree with KruseLuds comment! 
yeah i will totally automate the valve once the town starts actually making some money to fix their broken suff
their is also a big hill in the way 5 watt max power (by ftc laws) walkie talkies will probably just barely make that rx and tx to that distance
i decided to just buy a beefier computer so theyre not getting notifications late and i can send them to a bunch of people i think…
i havent tried to see how many email to texts i can do with google mail theyre getting mad at the scammers because they send so much garbage so ive only tried sending to myself only get about 2 and it starts a grace period where it shuts you off from sending anymore.
theres other issues they have if i had to sum it up in one word (lazy) i mean when you get 80 your body dont wanna move even though he know if he stops he will spiral downhill and ive seen it too
i ordered a ( HP Desktop Computer 400 G4-SFF Intel Core i5-7500 16GB 256 GB M.2-NVMe SSD Integrated Graphics Windows 10 Pro 64 bit) from newegg thats my spot to buy pc stuff because it give a good description of most of everything and stuff like that
i also got 2 coral accelerators to use with some cameras i plan to do in the future from seeedstudio thats why the overkill on the system although i thought about using this fire ace pc i built from scratch by myself
the tv is now a 75 inch(because i took that one down and got drunk and fell on it accidently lol) i would take a new pic but i accidently busted the camera out of my rear camera on my phone the pc is the same though i like to get drunk and build stuff
110 is impossible unless readings are due to a sensor error or mechanical issue with the tower
I agree you can skip tower full/not full.
That is what the tower overflow is sensing.
the hard drive was definatly bottlenecking my system as it could be powered with just only a usb port this other one i got from a failed attempt to upgrade the server cant be powered only usb telling me its definatly the hard drive
SSD and NVME drives should easily be powered by an USB port.
Mechanical HD on the other hand is trickier, because the size of the drive in bytes usually reflect the physical size of the internal drive and a physical larger drive require more power to move.
A mechanical HD will always seem like a bottleneck compared to a SSD or NVME drive.
The difference is like a steam powered race car and an electric powered race car.
In my opinion, when it comes to OT, the more out-of-band sensors the better.
I rather have three sensors than one. One is none, two is one.
If the overflow sensor is malfunctioning or the overflow pipe is clogged, broken, rusted out, etc. a secondary sensor comes quite useful.
This is where mini-PCs shine. They are just sipping electricity, light weight, can have large enough storage for data queue, and some backup, while have plenty of ports to expand. They are also very reasonably priced.
I watched a Beelink Mini S12 Pro installed to manage a private, natural-gas well. It involves all kinds of valves, tanks, separators, levers and such. Outdoor waterproof box, small solar panel and battery for backup. I am told it is running flawlessly for years now.
I agree that extra fall back sensors are important, but it was in the possible state scheme mentioned earlier unnecessary.