Well done!
Innovative Rainfall Gauge Wins Regional Competition
By: Yatt Malai on April 16, 2023
~ 4 min read
A team of five ITC students have scooped $5,000 after their innovative technology that can sensor rainfall came first in a Mekong River Commission competition

A team of students from the Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC) in Phnom Penh recently won first place in the Rainfall category for producing a technology that can sensor rainfall.

After their announced win in Laos on April 5 by the Mekong River Commission (MRC), Kiripost spoke with the five-member team at ITC, which spent about 15 weeks working on the Spinning Bucket Rain Gauge that won them $5,000.

During the interview, the team said that the gauge can be placed in areas to collect data on why a certain area is flooded and where the flooded water may be from, so that it can provide data to authorities to enable them to take measures to prevent disaster.

The team spent about 15 weeks completing the gauge and at times slept in the ITC laboratory when technical errors occurred that needed a quick solution as the deadline approached.

During the assignment, the team met and talked many times, and sometimes got embroiled in arguments after finding many concepts had not worked.

The gauge has two buckets. Rainwater in each bucket is released when it reaches the target volume of water, for example, 8ml or 6.23ml depending on the model of rain gauge.

They said they discovered some problems with the rain gauge as water spilled out of the buckets and, during heavy rain, the buckets switched too fast so they could not release all of the water.

These problems affect the accuracy of the rain gauge, so to solve them they brainstormed some ideas.

They came up with the concept of a water wheel that has six buckets rotated 360 degrees. Each bucket contains 7ml of rainwater, equal to 0.22mm of rainfall. With this concept, the water in each bucket can release all of the water and work well, even during heavy rain.

They learned that current rainfall data collection faces some communication problems due to the low network connection during rain or the location of the rain gauge, and they need to travel to the rain gauge to collect the data.

To solve this problem, they came up with LoRa, which is a wireless platform of IoT that can send data to a long distant station up to 10km or more away, depending on the type of LoRa they have chosen.

They added that by using LoRa, they can send data from the gauge to the station, which has a strong wifi connection. After that the station publishes data to a cloud and displays the monitoring. So, users can access the data directly from the cloud.
Full article: https://kiripost.com/stories/cambodia-i ... ompetition