jagij has posted efforts to remotely monitor the volume of water in a rainwater tank. A Raspberry Pi is a good data collector but not a good real-time sensor monitor. The project uses an ESP8266 to collect data from an HC-SR05 ultrasonic sensor to monitor water level in a tank to great accuracy.

All the data is sent to Adafruit’s IOT platform over MQTT. Adafruit has superb tutorials on how to set this up. You can do it over a secure connection, like I did, which is reasonably secure. I don’t like having to hard code the WiFi credentials in software, but the security risk there isn’t that bad.

You can set up a nice dashboard with the Adafruit IOT platform, which currently shows me the last 4h, 24h, 7d and 30d.

You can read the full tutorial on the blog and also see the Arduino code on GitHub.

Here at Adafruit, we sell all of these amazing components, but we couldn’t find a good way to interact with them over the Internet. There are certainly a lot of great services out there for datalogging, or communicating with your microcontroller over the web, but these services are either too complicated to get started, or they aren’t particularly fun to use. So, we decided to experiment with our own system, and that is how Adafruit IO got started.

To start, please visit https://io.adafruit.com, and take a look around.

Want to get started quickly? Get up and running with the Welcome to Adafruit IO Guide on the Adafruit Learning System.