An Expensive Failure of Judgement

So remember when I precariously perched a moderately encased rangefinder above my sump pump well? It was kinda wedged in between the cover and the well wall, and I thought there wasn't enough play in the line leading to the rangefinder as to let it drop in. Well... all my hackery finally caught up to me and a very expensive sensor ended up taking a swim. Current remained running through it the entire time so for several hours it swam in well water, slowly accreting minerals. No amount of drying out would save it.

I wasn't going to replace it with another expensive sensor... so I went the completely opposite direction and built an unbelievably primitive water detector. Here two plates of aluminum foil were hot-glued to construction paper and the bare end of my infamous telephone wire, then isolated in electrical tape. If water bridged the two aluminum plates, a connection would be made - at least enough of a connection to be considered a "high" signal.

The other end of the two wires were sent to the NPN transistor that was originally intended to work as a UART logic inverter. Now it was a simple logic gate; once the water closed the circuit the NPN shut off the current headed to a GPIO pin. If the pin was live, no water was detected. If the pin was dead, you had a problem.


The web front-end that I created for this whole rigamarole was updated to reflect this hack, and now just reports the binary status of the water detector. I'm not thrilled with the setup, but I also wasn't too keen on the idea of plopping any more money down on a solution.

So... lesson learned. Don't dangle water sensitive components over a well of water.

I do have a need for another security camera, so this whole setup may just be ditched in favor of another Motion rig. I really dig the I2C temperature and humidity breakout board however, and I'd like to keep using it. Maybe I'll save up my allowance and get a CC3000 WiFi board and pair it up with the temp/humidity board... that would be a pretty nifty & tiny package.