Integrating Indigo to Remote Water Tank Sensors via Cellular

Not quite sure what I need to do here, but I'm hoping the collective brain trust can steer me in the right direction...

I've got a project coming up that requires knowing what the level in a 50,000+ gallon water tank is remotely. After surveying the site earlier today, I've discovered that the tank is over 2 miles away from where Indigo will be running. And to top it off, there's absolutely no electricity available at the tank itself... it's all gravity fed back to the site where irrigation takes place. They currently drive up to the tank a couple of times a week to check the level and perform various activities based on what they find.

Having successfully deployed multiple Arduino controllers in similar types of projects, and also given the low voltage requirements of the Arduino platform, I'm considering mounting a solar panel or two, a battery, and an Arduino controller with a cellular add-on card (known as a "shield" in the Arduino world). This in turn would serve up data on multiple floats in the tank (or a single analog float) and send it out over GSM. I could alternatively send out SMS messages.

I can create a rudimentary web server in the Arduino (and have done so on other projects) and it appears there's also support for Growl if I need to go there.

Soooo, my question is... how would I go about sucking that data into Indigo so I can present the tank level in a control page? Are there any existing plugins that support this type of application?

I'm going with Indigo primarily because of subsequent phases of the project where I'll be controlling various pumps, multi-way valves, solenoids, and reading additional float levels in a new 125,000 gallon tank that will be local to the Indigo server.

The client wants the remote tank level ASAP and I'd like to give them something a bit sexier than a web page that spits out float levels in text (what I'd be doing if I just relied on the Arduino's web server).

Any other solutions come to mind? I'm all ears!

As an aside, I've been meaning to post something in the "success stories" section on an Indigo-based project in Los Angeles that won a national award in 2013 for residential rain water harvesting... ~50,000 gallon capacity (across multiple tanks/cisterns) with full weather integration to anticipate opening up system capacity in advance of a rain event. Completely consumed two EasyDAQ USB16PRMxN cards on that one and it was relatively straightforward thanks to Indigo's robust environment. Pesters and timers came just in time for that project... I'm using them all over the place! The whole team is notified of any critical alerts and can proactively address overall system problems (bad floats, bad pumps, broken pipes, etc.) as they come up. It's been working flawlessly for over a year now without a single reboot required.

Thanks!
Blaine

[jay (support)]

If the Arduino is accessible over the network from the IndigoServer Mac, then you can just write a script to ping it's web server for the data. Once you get it into a script you can stuff the data into variables. Alternatively, you could create a plugin that would present a device type representing the Arduino and add device states to that.

If the Arduino is accessible over the network from the IndigoServer Mac, then you can just write a script to ping it's web server for the data. Once you get it into a script you can stuff the data into variables. Alternatively, you could create a plugin that would present a device type representing the Arduino and add device states to that.

Thanks Jay... with some awesome suggestions from berkinet (Richard), I'm now looking at a wireless router and Phidgets, all powered by solar. These will then talk natively to Indigo via his Phidgets plugin. More off-the-shelf than the Arduino solution and less overall work... a win-win in my book!

[jay (support)]

Nice. And agreed - better to not reinvent the wheel.