Smart Water Flow Meter for Improved Measurement of Water Usage in a Smart City

Water shortage is one of the predominant problems which influences billions of humans throughout the world. With the cities transforming to dwelling places of smart infrastructure, controlling, analyzing and reducing the water consumption of the houses has proved to be challenging. Existing smart water monitoring devices are prone to theft, damage and can be quite expensive. As a result, developing countries are facing a difficult time in acquiring and maintaining high quality monitoring tools. Thereby water information stays erroneous and generally depends on isolated estimations. Hence, there is an increased demand for low-cost, reliable and precise flow sensors that are easy to use. To meet this necessity a low-cost, remote monitored smart water meter is proposed in this article to monitor water usage in urban private residences. A water flow sensor along with Raspberry Pi Pico is used that continuously monitors water usage. With the ability to monitor and visualize data with ease, the designed smart water meter is capable of sensing even moderate pipeline flow rates with a serverless architecture. The proposed meter also records monthly average water requirement of a house.