Sensors —
Bridge Monitor will use an array of sensors to detect any slight change in the bridge’s characteristics, changes to the frequency of the bridge’s vibration patterns, and the daily load of the bridge.
Sensor Requirements –
- Sensor must not have signal anomalies such as signal clipping, signal dropouts or intermittent noise spikes
- Errors such as aliasing, quantization and noise must be minimized. Data should be put through anti-aliasing filter, use high bit resolution ADC
- Can test by viewing a system with no load so that we can view the noise
Development Board —
The team is planning to utilize Nordic Semiconductor Boards for the project. The particular IoT board they are considering is the nRF9160 or the Nordic Thingy: 91. The team will need to implementing the NB-IoT aspect of the embedded device so that the project has full connectivity between the embedded system and the cloud application to easily send data from sensor measurements.
Base Station —
For the base station, the information is gathered and sent to the station via NB-IoT. The team has decided to utilize an existing base station and purchase bandwidth for it. In addition, the team must design and test signals that can be send from sensor nodes to base station in the desired band with low noise.
Cloud —
The project will use Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud service to store information that will be transferred between the embedded system and user interface.
Web Application —
This project requires an interface from the system to the user. The team is looking towards a web application to display the data and health of the structure. The application must be secure, reliable, and user-friendly. The app will have a dashboard showing the current information of the bridge, changes in the structural health over time, and notifications to the user whenever a change is detected in the system.