Amongst TEMBO’s objectives is to establish innovative operational sensing methods at a fraction (10%) of the costs compared to traditional methods. With “costs” we here refer to all costs related to the deployment, maintenance, and use of a sensing method. A 90% reduction in costs means that more is needed than just offering a cheap piece of hardware. In fact, TEMBO wishes to provide state-of-the-art measurements, even with these large reductions of costs.
The reduction of 90% may be reached for instance through the following means:
• come up with innovative sensing solutions that use different variables, different instruments, or re-purpose existing sensors, originally meant for other purposes.
• introducing low complexity hardware solutions, with easy to replace parts, that can be maintained as much as possible locally.
• establishment of local enterprises that can uptake and sell methods locally (requires the former 3 points).
In our work package, new sensing solutions are developed for surface water observations. These include:
• A low-cost low-complexity camera setup based on off-the-shelf hardware components in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem, to be used for image-based observations of surface water variables (water level and flows within this project but may be extended in other projects). ptBox or DischargeKeeper Light (DKL), developed by subcontractor of SEBA, Photrack AG.
• In addition, two full-size camera-based discharge systems DischargeKeeper (DK), developed by subcontractor of SEBA, Photrack AG to be installed on two sites in Zambia and Ghana and provide the users with continuous water level, flow velocity and discharge measuring data.
In this report, we briefly describe the sensing solutions, and demonstrate first uses of the methods over target sites. We also describe the two sites on which we benchmark the different sensing solutions DKL and DK.
