Water leakage detection

Thread Starter

ALFRED

Joined Nov 27, 2006
4
Dear All,

I am new here and new in electronics but really are interested in it.
Now I am building electronic devices which detect water existance. Yet I am success in detecting water but I want to display it in computer. Anyone here willing to help....I heard about microcontroller, but what and how it works and how to install to computer.

I am so much thankfull to somebody here who is willing to help. Thank you so much for your kind help.

Regards,
Alfred
 

pebe

Joined Oct 11, 2004
626
Dear All,

I am new here and new in electronics but really are interested in it.
Now I am building electronic devices which detect water existance. Yet I am success in detecting water but I want to display it in computer. Anyone here willing to help....I heard about microcontroller, but what and how it works and how to install to computer.

I am so much thankfull to somebody here who is willing to help. Thank you so much for your kind help.

Regards,
Alfred
If you could say what sort of output you get from your water detector and how you want to see its results displayed on a computer, then I'm sure someone here will be able to help you. At the moment you have not given enough information.
 

Thread Starter

ALFRED

Joined Nov 27, 2006
4
Thank you very much pebe,

I have 20 points to be sensored. One sensor is 12 Volt DC and works when a drop of water fall on it. When water drops, electric current will pass thru the circuits. My question is how to show the warning to computer display. I want the 20 points to be showed on display but one alerted point is "twingkling".

Will somebody help me?

Thank you very much.
Regards,
Alfred
 

pebe

Joined Oct 11, 2004
626
You don't say whether the 20 points are close together or well spaced out, and their proximity to the PC. That would affect the design of the sensor reader.

Either the serial or parallel port could be used for data retrieval, but a PC program would need to be written. Are you in a position to write it? If not, would a simple LED display be a better proposition?
 

Thread Starter

ALFRED

Joined Nov 27, 2006
4
Thank you very much pebe,

It spaced out 10-15 m away from PC. If I want program, what hardwares need be to installed? if no hardware would you plase tell me what of how to whrite the program?

Thank you very much,
Regards,
Alfred
 

pebe

Joined Oct 11, 2004
626
Hi Alfred,
However the PC is programmed, extra hardware will be required. You have 20 outputs but a PC’s parallel port has much less than that so some sort of external multiplexer would be required to sample them in sequence. That multiplexer must be driven by the PC program.

If the PC’s serial port is used, there are a couple of input control lines but the main input is by streams of data sent serially with extra bits added in a special way. Extra hardware would be needed to assemble the data and send it to the PC. The best way would be to use a microcontroller – probably with extra multiplexers.

Both the PC and the micro would need programming but the tuition required for a newcomer would be outside the scope of this forum. I think that such a project is not really viable unless you have a fair degree of experience.
 

thingmaker3

Joined May 16, 2005
5,083
An alternative to multiplexing would be something similar to a token ring. The computer could poll each sensor in turn, all of them on a single data line. This would, of course, make the individual sensors more complex.
 

kender

Joined Jan 17, 2007
264
Alfred said:
If I want program, what hardwares need be to installed?
I can recommend LabJack hardware for interfacing the sensors to a PC via USB. I had a lot of good experinece with LabJack U12. It has 20 digital I/O lines, however the input voltage is limited to 5V.

In general, there are tons of commercial off-the-shelf digital I/O hardware out there.
 
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