CHENNAI: Four students of a Chennai school have designed a miniature flood alarm system that will raise an alarm once the water level in a lake or reservoir crosses a safety mark. It not only alerts people living nearby with a buzzer, but also sends alert messages to the officials concerned.
Four Class VIII students of Velammal Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Mogappiar who designed the system, were inspired by last year’s disastrous floods.
“During the recent floods, we read in newspapers that the reason for large scale destruction was because people living along the river banks were not alerted at the right time about excess rain water being released from reservoirs,” said A Rohit, one of the four who designed it.
His teammate K Karthikeyan said, “So, we decided to build an automated system which has a LCD screen to display the water level and emergency LED lights, buzzers all along the boundary of the reservoirs.”
Once the water crosses the safety mark, a level sensor placed along this mark would pass a signal to the control unit which would change the colour of the LED lights from green to red and activate the buzzers.
“Since robotics was a part of our curriculum the past two years, creating a frame and assembling was easy and now we are working on a Global System for Mobile Communication platform, which can send SMS alerts to all the officials during such emergencies,” said VS Nishok, a team member.