Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

Posted on Behalf of Nicholas Möller.

The River DAQ is a Hydraulic Analysis and Design (CEE 452) class project to provide way to quickly and economically gather hydraulic data. The River DAQ can be deployed in many types of open channels such as municipal drainage routes and natural waterways. The RiverDAQ is composed of primarily an Arduino platform connected to a variety of sensors. The electrical hardware is housed in a waterproof and floatable case built with ¼ inch acrylic. In the testing stage, a GPS sensor was used in order to measure surface velocity of open channels. Data was collected and saved to a SD memory card as the device floated downstream, which then was transferred to a computer program for analysis. Surface velocity measurements were obtained from the GPS data which was then used to determine discharge of a waterway. Future work will bring more sensor options to the scalable platform including but not limited to salinity, temperature, and sonar.

During the spring 2012 semester our group built and tested the device. We compared our data with the data from the USGS gage station on Boneyard Creek, discharge obtained from the Pygmy current meter, and camera particle tracking to verify the accuracy of our device. Our group took measurements in the Saline Branch near Crystal Lake Park in Urbana and Boneyard Creek near the Engineering Quad. Our group also built the unit by Engineering Open House on March 9^th, 2012, where it won third price for class projects, and refined it for our CEE 452 class project afterwards.