The National Polytechnic Institute’s (IPN) new water quality monitoring prototype, known as the TlalocBox, could help improve Mexico’s water supply by measuring the purity of cistern water in real time, the institute announced on Sunday.
The TlalocBox, named for the Aztec rain god, was developed to detect contaminants in Mexico’s water, such as heavy metals, industrial chemicals and agricultural waste, thereby helping to prevent disease and environmental damage.
Eduardo Rodrigo Cruz Figueroa and Andrés Jalpilla López, two telematics students from the Interdisciplinary Professional Unit in Engineering and Advanced Technologies (UPIITA), created the prototype, a hermetic box with a system that can be used to monitor the temperature, acidity or alkalinity (pH) and turbidity of a water supply.
The device has three sensors, operates using an Arduino microcontroller — an open-source electronics platform — and is powered by a portable rechargeable battery.
“The box is specially designed to prevent water from leaking and damaging electronic components, while identifying the presence of contaminants,” Cruz Figueroa explained in an IPN press release. Unlike the technologies currently used to monitor Mexico’s water supply, which require the collection of samples that take several days to analyze, the TlalocBox provides almost immediate results thanks to its use of an Internet of Things system.
It connects to SigFox — a low-power global network — and sends small amounts of data over long distances to a platform.
“We programmed the Arduino board so that, once it obtains information from the sensors, it sends the data through the SigFox network to a platform called ThingSpeak, available to end users with very simple interpretation via mobile apps or PCs,” said Jalpilla López.
The students also developed a web and mobile application where data is updated every 15 minutes. The app features a traffic light system, with green indicating that water quality is acceptable, yellow representing average quality and red meaning high contamination.
The IPN project aligns with President Claudia Sheinbaum’s water policy, which aims to improve the quality of Mexico’s water supply.
With reports from La Jornada
