Meedar – Temperature

The Ministry of Works, Municipalities Affairs and Urban Planning is a government entity that is established to respond to the needs of the Bahraini society through their Aquacultural Department which aims to enhance Bahrain’s aquacultural life regarding fish farming. One of their responsibilities is to support the aqua life and enhance it by increasing the production rate of the different fish breeds in the hatchery. Currently, the Aquacultural Department is using a traditional way of using a thermometer to measure the temperature levels from the fish tanks which are then recorded manually on paper. The data collection process results in a heavy workload and many of the actions which the employees take are usually based on past experiences and self-judgment which could impact their decision making and decrease their productivity.

The Aquacultural Department has been struggling with actively monitoring and controlling the temperature of the tanks in an efficient manner, any error could affect the production rate of the fish. Therefore, the current system is outdated which causes the exhaustion of manpower and the margin of error is high. On the other hand, the high cost, due to the high mortality rate, is an extremely worrying issue for the department, as it could end up wasting a lot of valuable resources and precious time.

The Cloud Innovation Center at Bahrain Polytechnic teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop a solution which the Aquacultural department in the Ministery of works could utilize. The proposed solution is to create a system that acts as a platform for recording, monitoring, and controlling the fish tanks. The launched system is going to represent a Smart Aquaculture Solution that visualizes the temperature changes and displays it on an interactive dashboard. Developing the solution will allow the students to explore new technologies and utilize the AWS cloud services. It is a great opportunity to inspire a generation of university graduates to delve into the new era of innovative technologies.

The developed solution consists of a dashboard which monitors the temperature of each fish tank using sensors which allows the system to control the water temperature levels through automated approaches using the temperature valves. As well as alerting the users using notifications sent to mobile devices or displayed on the interactive dashboard. In addition to that, the system can store data on the cloud. The technologies used in this system are, first, the Arduino to link hardware with the cloud then the Message Queuing Telemetry Trasport (MQTT) protocol to interact with the IoT devices which includes sending and receiving messages on the cloud. Moreover, we utilize AWS IoT Core which allows us to authorize and connect external devices, monitor the temperature level, and allocate suitable destinations for the collected data from MQTT protocol. In addition to that, Amazon Time Stream allows us to store and analyze data from physical devices, in collaboration with Grafana on AWS which will be responsible for taking this stored data and distribute it on multiple charts that are built in Grafana dashboard, Furthermore, it allows us to build a customizable interactive dashboard to monitor the fish tanks with AWS IoT Twin Maker to create living digital representation of the actual system. Similarly, AWS Amplify was used to build and configure the website which hosts this interactive dashboard. Interaction with the system can go through the dashboard or a customized Alexa skill. Additionally, AWS API gateway is responsible for creating a link between the front and back-end for the project. Finally, AWS Lambda is used to create functions and triggers to handle multiple scenarios of Temperature changing.

The system should result in enhancing the fish fingerlings survival rate and maximizing the production levels of the aquaculture center hatchery, alongside reducing the reaction time to incidents or faults which may occur with the tanks.