Project for measuring oil levels with Raspberry Pi
I have 275 gallon oil tank, just like a lot of homes out in the county. It's down in the basement, and it has one of those pretty standard tank liquid level gauges. This means I have to go down to the basement and check it every now and then which is not optimal.
So I'm working on using my Raspberry Pi Zero W, but I have also had it working on a Raspberry Pi 2 (and 3). I also use a PING))) Ultrasonic Distance Sensor. I then display the data on a website using ExpressJS also running on my RPI. Also, this fits on just a 2GB microSD card, which is nice (and cheap)
This first step is to create a module specifically for taking the measurements.
Option 1:Resin.io (Recommended)
Follow the Getting Started
When you get to the Deploy Code part, swap their simple-server-node repository with this one
git clone git@github.com:mckaycr/sonicdipstick.git
Once the repo is cloned, change directory into the newly created sonicdipstick directory and add the resin git remote endpoint by running the command git remote add shown in the top-right corner of your application page:
cd sonicdipstick
git remote add resin <USERNAME>@git.resin.io:<USERNAME>/<APPNAME>.git
From there just continue following the Deploy Code guide again, and your oil sensor should be deployed
In your browser go to:
http://<IPADDRESS>/api
{"date":"04/17/2018",
"data":{
"residual":"22",
"percentile":50,
"gallons":137.5
},
"time":"18:32:20"}
It is super simple to integrate this sensor into Home Assistant.
I'm not really going to go into how to set up home assistant, so follow their Getting Started guide.
Once you are up and running edit your configuration.yaml file by adding the following under sensor:
- platform: rest
name: 'Oil Level'
resource: http://<IPADDRESS>/api
unit_of_measurement: 'inches'
value_template: '{{ value_json.data.gallons | round(0)}}'
scan_interval: 3600
Then restart Home Assistant, and you should start seeing your oil measurements.