IoT Based Water Pollution Monitoring System Using RC Boat

Abstract

Water bodies such as lakes, canals and reservoirs are a major source of drinking water, yet they are increasingly contaminated by domestic sewage, solid waste, toxic effluents and agricultural runoff. Conventional water-quality monitoring relies on manually rowing or motoring a boat across a water body to collect samples for laboratory analysis, a process that is slow, labour-intensive and covers only a few sample points. This paper presents the design and implementation of a remote-controlled (RC) boat that automates this process by combining wireless remote control with Internet-of-Things (IoT) based sensing. The boat carries a pH sensor and a temperature-and-humidity sensor to characterise water quality, and a GPS module to record the location at which the readings were taken. A NodeMCU (ESP8266) micro-controller reads the sensors and the GPS coordinates and streams the data over Wi-Fi to the Blynk IoT cloud platform, where it can be viewed in real time on a smartphone. Boat movement is controlled independently through a 434 MHz RF link using an HT12E encoder/HT12D decoder pair and an L293D motor driver, so that navigation and sensing operate as two decoupled modules. A working prototype was built and tested on a local water body; the system successfully reported live pH, temperature, humidity and GPS values to a mobile device, demonstrating that the approach can replace manual sampling for routine monitoring of lakes and reservoirs.