Waterlevel

My first ever project based on Arduino code. I recently installed two 10000 liter rainwater tanks, and I wanted to visualize how much water is left in the tanks in real time. The information needed to be visual on a small LCD screen inside my garage and also on a web page, where it could be scraped or viewed. I also wanted to be able to update the Arduino code using a web browser.

Hardware components used:

• Adafruit ESP32 Huzzah
• Adafruit Assembled Terminal Block Breakout FeatherWing // because I'm bad at soldering directly to a proto board.
• A02YYUW waterproof distance meter
• Grove 16x2 LCD white on blue
• Plastic box to mount LCD and ESP

Software components (Arduino libraries) used:

• Wifi: for network connectivity
• rgb_lcd: for the Grove Seeed LCD screen
• Softwareserial: to represent the software serial port for the ultrasonic distance sensor
• ArduinoJSON: to buid the web page
• Webserver & ElegantOTA: for Over The Air updates of the code

The code is pretty self-explanatory (I think): first Wifi is enabled then the JSON webserver and the OTA webserver are started. The loop will take a reading and update the LCD screen every 5 seconds. When a web client connects, an up-to-date web page will be generated.

Additional info:

• I gave the ESP32 a static IP address through DHCP reservation.
• The JSON webserver is running on port 80, the OTA server on port 81.
• The LCD screen is connected to SDA & SCL ports.
• The LCD screen shows the reading in percentage and displays a progress bar.
• The JSON webserver shows percentage and the distance to the water. The percentage information is gathered by Home Assistant through a REST API call sensor so I have historical metrics available.

{
  "data": 87,
  "distance": 313
}

Home Assistant configuration:

sensor:
- platform: rest
    name: regenput
    resource: http://192.168.0.x
    value_template: "{{value_json.data}}"
    unit_of_measurement: "%"
    scan_interval: 60

• I also display the information on my Dakboard. As Dakboard can only talk to external https resources, I am using a Traefik reverse proxy, protected by Cloudflare and a Cloudflare Tunnel to allow access to the JSON server (config out of scope).

View of the hardware

Cable between sensor and ESP32 not shown