Design of a virtual instrument for water quality monitoring across the Internet

Abstract This article presents the design of a new distributed and multi-platform system for water quality monitoring, enhanced with powerful Internet capabilities. The measured variables are temperature, turbidity, pH, dissolved oxygen, and electrical conductivity. The signal-conditioning block has been simplified through the use of software routines for thermal compensation, hence, reducing the cost and dimensions. The system offers a wide variety of Internet capabilities, like e-mail alarm notifications, automatic storage of measured data in a remote machine via the FTP protocol, dynamic generation of HTML reports, real time graphs, and indicators visible from a remote web browser, etc. …