Remote Sensor Monitoring by Radio with Arduino: Detecting Intruders, Fires, Flammable and Toxic Gases, and Other Hazards at a Distance

by David Leithauser

This book is about connecting sensors and radio transceivers to an Arduino so that you can monitor the sensor readings from a distance. You can put the Arduino sensor package miles away from the receiving station, in your front or back yard, or even in your home like your basement or attic. Although the techniques described in this book will work with any type of sensor input, the book will focus on sensors that detect potentially dangerous or disruptive conditions. These will include intruders, fires, temperature extremes (both hot and cold), flammable gases, toxic gases like pollution, power failures, floods (including minor “floods” like a pipe bursting), and other situations. For the radio communications, we will use the nRF24L01 transceiver. This inexpensive chip (usually around $1.00 on EBay) interfaces easily with the Arduino and can both transmit and receive data. It has an advertised range of 100 meters (about 328 feet) for the basic unit, although in actual practice it may be closer to 30 meters (about 98 feet). However, with an optional antenna the range is reported to be 1,000 meters (1 km, about .6 miles). In the first five chapters, I explain the hardware and software aspects of this handy transceiver, enabling you to set up the communications. I even explain how to set up repeater transmitters that can relay the signal from locations beyond the 1 km range. Thus, this books provides ideas for how to use the nRF24L01 transceiver for many purposes. In the chapters after these five chapters on the basics of the nRF24L01, I discuss attaching and operating various sensors, explaining how to set them up and integrate them into the transmission software. The chapters will be divided by hazards you can monitor, not specific sensors, so one chapter may include several different types of sensors that can be used to detect the same hazard. This book has been rewritten to correct the errors reported in some reviews. Mistakes in code have been corrected so all sketches compile now, grammatical mistakes corrected, etc. The main sketches in this book can be downloaded from any of these URLs See the ReadMe.txt file in the archive for advice on using the files. All of the sketches in this book have been tested and work as described. If you have any problem running them, you can contact the author at Leithauser@aol.com. Please use subject line Remote Sensor Book on the email.

120 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 16, 2016

Reviews

[Hugo S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!

The book is well written, and organized. The sensors used are the most common sensors used in the Arduino world, that come in the kits sold with sensors packages such as the eleego, and the adafruit kits. The code in the sketches is well explained so that beginners learn exactly what happens when the code is executed by the microcontroller, along with the wiring diagrams that adds an extra level of understanding and learning experience, good reference book.

[Earl Baugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent intro, but short.

Does have all the code available, so no retyping.
Goes quick to the point. Doesn’t cover any “uses” of the data. Would be handy if it came with some sort of program that ran on a raspberry pi to start the processing from the receiver. It’s a useful start in any case.

[Clive Harding BSc Honours · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually learnt a lot from following this book