Every engineer has at least once dreamed of a world that is completely connected. A futuristic world where you tell your watch or your digital assistant where you want to go and a car just comes up to your doorstep and takes you there. A world where you just control all the lights and appliances in your house from your phone. A world in which everything is just a touch more efficient, automated, and smart. For me, this was a recurring dream.
The world is very close to something like that. And our team at Nuventure is playing a part in making that dream a reality. This is a story of one of the projects that we believe took the world one step further to achieve this dream.
As with a lot of great stories, and great inventions, this one also starts with the need, and realizing that need. One of our clients, a major manufacturer of water supply equipment based in Europe, wanted a completely automated swimming pool management system for their customers. Swimming pools often require constant maintenance and manually making sure that water quality is good, maintaining the right pH, and it is not the most easiest or the most exciting task. But automating the entire process, making your life easier, and at the same time acting like Tony Stark, that is kinda cool.
Swimming pool management involves maintaining the water level, quality, pH, chlorine levels, and running the systems for doing these tasks. If you’re doing this manually, you’ll be using measuring the pH and chlorine levels by hand, and by hand, I mean literally dipping pH indicators at different points in your pool and measuring them.
And it doesn’t end there. Now you have to carefully measure the chemicals to calibrate the pH in your swimming pool, by taking into account the current pH, total quantity of water, or in short, by doing a lot of math. And the same goes for chlorine levels too. Guess what? The level of pH can change when you adjust the chlorine levels.
What we had to do
We had to automate this whole process. In short, we had to make a custom IoT app that can do the following.
- Automating the swimming pool
- Controlling the heat pump and variable speed pump which include on/off, speed adjustments, etc.
- Controlling the salt chlorinator
- Automate or remotely manage the swimming pool lighting
- Controlling the sensors (pH, ORP, Temperature, and EC).
- Maintaining the various chemical parameters (pH, chlorine, etc)
- Diagnosing any malfunctions in the system and notifying the customer and the installer about it.
What we did: a custom IoT app for automating swimming pools
Our engineers got to work and delivered exactly what the client had in mind. As the end product will be used by the common man, the application UI was a key aspect. The app must be robust, with a clean and easy to navigate interface. The app was developed in such a way that a layman who has no idea about the underlying technology could use the smart monitoring system.
We used frameworks such as Flutter and Firebase to develop mobile applications on iOS and Android. For backend web and APIs we used Python Django.
- The app will notify the customer about chemical levels in the pool, and let them visualize and analyze the data.
- Using Flutter, we were able to leverage cross-platform technology with less development effort.
- In case of any malfunction, the system will notify the pool owner as well as the installer. They will also get a report with more details of the error including error codes. The service team can easily fix the problem, sometimes even remotely.
- Essentially, with the help of IoT and cloud technology, an otherwise manual and repetitive process was made smart and automatic.
You can read about the swimming pool automation project here.
Reach out to us for custom IoT solutions at www.nuventure.in