Flood Warning System
Research project for M.Sc. in Computer Science (University of Colombo School of Computing).
Research supervisor: Dr. D N Ranasinghe.
Overview
People faced floods and other related disasters from thousands of years. Rainfall is the most effected reason for floods. So need to monitor rainfalls and other climate changes regularly. Meteorologists measure rainfall readings 8 times per day and announce the average of those once a day. If rainfall exceeds the threshold limit between announce times, there is no way to inform it. If there is an automatic system to measure rainfall rate and other climate changes, then people can save easily. This is a computer based fully automatic flood warning system.
Tipping Bucket
The tipping bucket is the rain water collecting and counting unit. It measures rainfall rates. I made my own tipping bucket.
Counter Unit
The counter unit counts the rainfall rates. It uses a Light Emitting Diode (LED) and a Light Dependent Resister (LDR) to with the purpose of. The counting is handled by using a simple logic. When a tipping bucket is full with rain water it turns down around the central axis as the weight. Then the empty bucket comes up automatically and starts to collect rain water again. When the turning occurs the bucket is cross the LED and LDR path. So the counter makes one count.
Analog to Digital Converter
Analog to Digital converter is the device converts the analogue signal generated by counter unit to digital signal. Then the converted digital signal feed to the PC.
Software System
To build the software system I used free and open-source software and the system runs on Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and uses MySQL databases management system. So it makes a platform independent system as it run on JVM.
The software system gets the rainfall from the external circuit and continuously compare with the threshold values. If the rainfall exceeds threshold limit the system automatically start the warnings. The system issues visible and audible warnings too.
