Smart Water Quality Monitoring Device: Design and Build
In this project, my team designed a prototype of a Smart Water Buoy to assess the feasibility of a low-cost water quality monitoring device for remote data collection in local rivers. This project was inspired by the desire to provide greater access to water quality metrics that communicate the health of polluted waterways in our communities, and to support the advocacy work of organizations like the Haw River Alliance.
We built a working prototype with an Arduino Uno and collected data on Total Dissolved Solids, Conductivity, Turbidity, and pH in two local waterways. With higher-quality sensors, better waterproofing, and reinforced wiring, we determined that the low-cost Arduino system could be used to build a Smart Water Buoy that is reliable for water quality monitoring—a success for citizen science.