
GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account - ColinWright
http://www.gaugemap.co.uk/
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olva22
This is amazing! I've wanted to do some "citizen science" project in waterways
around me. For instance, building cheap sensors that detect temperature/water
level/salinity/particulates/etc that are so cheap as to be basically
disposable.

The sensor itself could probably be made for less than $10 these days using
various arduino modules, but I'm stuck on how to have the sensors communicate
back to a "base station" to collect the information. Cellular-based would
probably have great range but who wants to have a phone plan for each sensor!
Zigbee may be an alternative, but it may require line of sight. Obviously it'd
also have to be low power to work on a LiIon battery, or possibly have a solar
panel to harvest power.

I believe the only way to make change is to show our impacts on our
environment. And local government doesn't have the tech expertise, money or
political willpower to suggest that "local business" may be destroying our
health (when it's creating jobs!).

Anyone have any tech suggestions or organizations that do this sort of thing?

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Animats
Search for "M2M" (machine to machine) communications. There's a lot of this
going on over old 2-way paging networks. It's how the non-vaporware "Internet
of things" works. There are thousands of air conditioning compressors,
refrigeration units, elevators, pumping stations, and other boring but
important pieces of infrastructure sending their short messages every few
minutes. Often they're plain text, something like "Pump 1: OFF. Pump 2: ON.
Inside temp: 71. Outside temp: 52. Faults: NONE." There are little M2M modules
for such communication. They tend to be rugged, reliable, and cost a few
hundred dollars.

Some of these use cellular service. There are special low-data-rate M2M plans
for this. AT&T charges $3.33 a month for 1MB/month if you pay by the year. If
you have a protocol that doesn't bloat its data traffic by using HTTP, HTTPS,
XML, JSON, and other data hogs to send a few bytes of payload, this works out
well.

There's something new called LoRa.[1] This is a standard for low-bandwidth
wireless network devices with a claimed 10 mile range. Data rates range from
300 bps to 50 kbps. They run in the 900MHz ISM band, so they have good
building and foliage penetration, although the range then drops to a claimed
2-3 miles. Units start around $56 on Digi-Key. There are Internet gateways
available, so that many of the little cards can be connected to the wider
world.

[1] [https://www.lora-alliance.org/](https://www.lora-alliance.org/)

~~~
blakecaldwell
Satellite is also an option for remote locations:

[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13745](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13745)

$250 for this module, and $12/month for the satellite usage.

For the sensor itself, that's a simple micro controller for under $10, and a
$5 sensor, a battery pack, solar panel, and a most likely, a few resistors.
Costs add up quickly if you don't want to run out and replace the batteries,
and if you want it to phone home.

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mojoe
Just out of curiosity, what's the probability that Twitter would shut down
these river gauge accounts because they're not people? Does Twitter have a
history of leaving projects like this alone?

~~~
seanclayton
There are beyond thousands of twitter account bots that say they are
bots—never heard of Twitter shutting one down.

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aembleton
This is a brilliant presentation of data. It's straight forward to make out
which parts of the country are at current risk of flooding. It's a shame there
are aren't more sensors of river flow but what there is, is useful.

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danso
FWIW, the US Geological Survey has an API (plus their own interactives and
reports) for river flow
[http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt](http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt)

~~~
smacktoward
Yup -- they even have configurable SMS & email alerts you can set up to let
you know when the water level at a particular point goes below or above a
specified depth:
[http://water.usgs.gov/waternow/](http://water.usgs.gov/waternow/)

I use it to let me know when my local river is running deep enough to make for
a fun day out on a kayak.

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pilom
I made a similar map (though much less pretty) for the US a few years ago:
[http://whitewatermap.com](http://whitewatermap.com)

~~~
cossatot
Also, the links to go to the American Whitewater pages are broken: It gives
americanwhitewater.org//content/... instead of
americanwhitewater.org/content/... But thanks again, this is really helpful.

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rripken
Compare to the usgs site or this US army corps site:
[http://riverstatus.usace.army.mil](http://riverstatus.usace.army.mil)

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ablation
Excellent site and very timely - the UK is currently undergoing a series of
serious flooding incidents, especially in the north of the country.

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foolinaround
Amazing!

If we had this in our rivers prior to the recent Chennai floods, several lives
and property could have been saved.

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wahsd
Is it possible to limit zooming out and panning with Google maps? It strikes
me that it would make for a better UX if you could limit that behavior to
avoid shifting the map out of the relevant area for some of the less savvy
users.

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deutronium
Is there any information on the sensors themselves out of interest.

I'm curious if they use something like LoRa with CSS. Or FSK. Or some kind of
cellular system.

