Design and development of a satellite ground station for water resource monitoring

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The SU Department of Forestry has the responsibility to monitor, assess and suggestmanagement processes for water resources in some remote areas. The researchers needinformation on wind speed, wind direction, soil run-o , absorption and soil drainage.Most of the areas they are targeting have no form of GSM/GPRS coverage. This thesispresents the design and development of a Zigbee based wireless sensor network to senddata from distributed sensor nodes to a ground station, all in a remote area. The groundstation in turn uses a global commercial satellite communications system to send the eld data to a centralised host computer. This was accomplished through the integrationof the most common and popular open source and commercial electronics prototypingplatforms, namely, Arduino, Digi XBee radio, Raspberry Pi and Iridium modem. Thesystem relies on an Arduino Uno working as a sensor node, Digi XBee radios for formingwireless mesh and multi-hop networks, Raspberry Pi being the heart of the groundstation and the Iridium modem to send data to the master station through the Iridiumgateway. A comprehensive literature study was conducted and a prototype of the systemimplemented. Various tests were conducted to determine and prove the feasibility of thesystem.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University