Measuring empy space

If you've been following my recent posts on twitter, you'll be aware that I've finally got round to hooking up the MaxBotix rangefinders into our water tanks. So far I've done the main house tank and have sketches and buried duct ready to do the ones that water the garden.

Some more technical details here than I can fit in tweets:
* The sensors themselves sit through the roof of the tank. This involves drilling a 3/4" hole in the top of the tank and inserting the sensor from below, so you won't want to put it more than an arms reach from the access hole. The sensors I purchased have NPR thereads not BSP, so you may want to pick up matching nuts at the same time depending on local availability.
* I mounted some 6-way header pins on the sensor, and soldered the female end onto the cable so that it didn't twist as I tightened it up. All mounted in a 20mm conduit box on the tank.

Inside the shed, I'm just using a clone arduino with a wiznet ethernet shield (ebay/aliexpress) and a very basic sketch using the pulse width measurement from the sensor. As normal, it's available on GitHub for anyone interested. It pushes to an on-site MQTT broker (mosquitto) that's used to gather various sensor metrics and fed into home-assistant, where it also gets archived into InfluxDB for longer term plots

status/housetanksensor online

sensors/housetanks/depthbelowsensor 419

sensors/housetanks/litres 20762

I use the status for LWT messages, and the sensors has the raw air-gap measurement (mm below sensor - range is 300 -> 5000) as well as a calculated volume (see the arduino code for constants and calculation)

Importing into hass is as simple as

  - platform: mqtt

    name: House water tanks volume

    icon: mdi:water-pump

    availability_topic: status/housetanksensor

    unit_of_measurement: l

    state_topic: sensors/housetanks/litres

into the configuration.yaml

Next up, getting the irrigation system working...