On Aug 19, 1:39*am, SF Man wrote:
On Fri, 19 Aug 2011 05:00:57 +0200, Sjouke Burry wrote:
put reed relays along the pipe, which switch a row of say 10-20 leds.
That should give you a nice display

I'm amazed at the ingenuity of the suggestions!

This idea seems elegant.

A pipe with a floating magnet (either inside the pipe or a ring outside the
pipe).

As the magnet moves up and down, differnet switches are turned on or off.

Are you suggesting that the one switch which is 'active' would be the water
level?

I guess that would take a lot of reed switches ... to cover about 5 feet of
water level travel ... but the result 'would' be an interesting display in
the kitchen!

I'm sure you can find some kind of ethernet compatible I/O widget
that has basic contact inputs that you could connect to this
arrangement. Then you could hook that up to a wireless bridge,
etc to connect to your home LAN.

How many switches it takes depends on what
resolution you want. But it's also not as simple as the magnet
keeping the switch closed. The magnet will trigger a switch
while it's next to it. At that point, you need something on the
other end, eg PC software program that keeps track of the
last switch that was triggered. Then you know the water
level is somewhere between the two switches on either
side of the last one tripped. Would require quite a few
switches to get any accuracy.

I would think a pressure sensor would be the easiest.
One sensor does it. Not sure how easy it is to find
one that covers the necessary range and is reasonable
cost.