IoT-Based Rainfall Monitoring System Using a Tipping Bucket Rain Gauge Sensor and ESP32 DevKit V1

Abstract

Rainfall is one of the most important hydrometeorological parameters used in weather observation, water resource management, and disaster mitigation. Accurate and real-time rainfall information is essential for environmental monitoring and decision-making. This study aims to develop an Internet of Things (IoT)-based rainfall monitoring system using a tipping bucket rain gauge sensor, ESP32 DevKit V1, LCD I2C, and the ThingSpeak cloud platform. The proposed system measures rainfall automatically, processes the data using ESP32, displays the results on an LCD, and transmits the data via Wi-Fi to ThingSpeak for real-time monitoring. The measurement results were validated using rainfall observations from the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics (BMKG). Experimental results showed that the developed system successfully performed rainfall measurement, cloud-based data transmission, and online monitoring. The validation process resulted in an average error of 1.38% and an average accuracy of 98.62%, indicating that the proposed system provides reliable rainfall measurements. Therefore, the developed system can serve as an alternative solution for real-time rainfall monitoring applications.