ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed May 01, 2019 8:55 pm #82105 I live rural, we have a well. 330' deep, water 175' from the top. I have found I can set my phone on the top cap with a voice recording app running and tap the well cap with a hammer. Then feed that recording into Audacity and I get:

-----|---i----------

The initial BANG and in my case .325 seconds later soft >dink<. Speed of sound at my elevation is 1090 ft/sec. So 1090*.325 = 354ft which is round trip, so one way is 177 ft to the water. Ta-Da!

Here is where my mind is going. I want to BANG-dink every day (say 2AM). First thought: a small motor, cam, wight - which is going to bounce - hmmm. OK, how about a small speaker of some sort that I could feed a 5 volt square wave to, create the BANG and a microphone for the >dink< and use some old SR04 software. Speaker? Mic? ESP8266, I've got, SW, not a problem. 2AM, BANG, measure return, transmit to server & SQL.

Thanks

- Thu May 02, 2019 7:04 am #82116 A solenoid was my first thought. I think it would need more energy that a direct hit would produce.

Check on the speed of the sound. I don't think you are not dealing with the speed of sound in air. See what is used for ultrasonic in materials.

- Thu May 02, 2019 8:08 pm #82123 Your current method generates a very high volume impulse inside the well - a speaker outside the well wouldn't do this, and you'd need quite a high volume even if you placed it inside the enclosure, as volume decreases according to the square of distance (and it's round trip).

My first thought would be to use a LiDAR or RADAR detector, but can you get inside the well to mount it on the lid or roof? You could do something like this approach with a laser and a webcam:

https://sites.google.com/site/todddanko/home/webcam_laser_ranger

or this

http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/200110/vision.htm