Low-Cost Rain Gauge Looks For Floods

We’ve seen a lot of uses for the now-ubiquitous ESP chip, including a numerous wilderness-monitoring devices.

Pluvi.on stands out with some attractive solutions and a simple design.

A lot of outdoor projects involve some sort of stock weather-resistance enclosure, but this project has a custom-designed acrylic box. About 4 inches across, the gauge uses a seesaw-like bucket to measure rain—a funnel, built into the enclosure, sends water into the gauge which records each time the bucket mechanism tilts, thereby recording the intensity of the rain. A NodeMCU packing an ESP8266 WiFi SoC sends the data to the cloud, helping predict the possibility of a flood in the area.

[Diogo Tolezano] and [Pedro Godoy] developed Pluvi.on as part of a Red Bull Basement hacker residency in São Paolo, Brazil. Interested in building your own Pluvi.on? They have building steps up on Instructables.

More ESP projects abound on Hackday, including this ESP mini robot, a data-logging hamster wheel, and an ESP32 information display.

14 thoughts on “Low-Cost Rain Gauge Looks For Floods

    1. I first saw this see-saw design in a hydrographic station on top of Table Mountain (Cape Town). The see-saw was made of brass, and the station was already about 100 years old. Every time it seed or sawed (are those words?) it moved a pen pointer up a paper chart on a roller that (used to) rotate slowly to record when and how much rain fell.

      Nice project though. It allows anyone to benefit from an old design.

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