Water Quality Sensing

The UDRI team of software engineers consisting chiefly of NDL founding members conducted a knowledge transfer with the previous contractor on the most recent features developed, in order to gain a solid understanding of the software, its capabilities, and the overall development direction. The team then implemented a strategy for managing the project and sharing source code, so that the water testing company’s teams could work along with UDRI’s engineers. UDRI also conducted lab and field tests on the sensor modules, and the software system. 

The water testing company’s portable water quality testing system is a multi-parameter instrument for measuring critical parameters in water. These include dissolved oxygen, turbidity, pH, ORP, conductivity, specific conductance, salinity, TDS, resistivity, TSS, ammonium, ammonia, chloride, nitrate, depth, temperature, and GPS coordinates. Designed for use in surface water, groundwater, coastal/estuarine, aquaculture, and wastewater, the tool measures water quality parameters with digital sensors. 

UDRI worked directly with the water testing company’s software and hardware development teams. The team rebuilt and upgraded the water testing software system to not only be able to work with newer Windows OSs, but also leverage their new capabilities to optimize its computational and graphical features. UDRI also worked with the water testing company’s teams to accommodate new sensor modules and a new easier to understand “depth indicating” chart type. 

The team worked with the water testing company on the concepts of a Bluetooth connected system and consulted on the necessary hardware and software architecture for the new system. UDRI helped define the plausibility of the Bluetooth based system, and the needed changes to allow the current software system to interpret and visualize the sensor data packages.