Railway Water Level Indicator & Telemetry Unit
Autonomous low-power microcontroller telemetry unit designed for railway track and coach reservoir monitoring with GNSS and cellular reporting.
Project Overview
Remote railway water installations and track-side drainage reservoirs operate in harsh outdoor conditions with battery and solar constraints. The system required autonomous, ultra-low-power operation capable of transmitting critical level data and precise GPS coordinates to centralized servers.
What It Does
An autonomous ARM Cortex-M4 embedded firmware unit that acquires hydrostatic pressure data, decodes real-time satellite navigation streams, packages encrypted telemetry, and delivers updates to cloud brokers while maintaining extended battery longevity through aggressive power management.
Key Capabilities
Engineering Highlights
- Engineered multi-priority FreeRTOS task schedules for deterministic sensor and communication handling
- Implemented a resilient AT command parser for cellular registration and socket negotiation
- Integrated hardware self-diagnostics to identify sensor disconnection and peripheral faults
- Configured ultra-low-power microampere sleep modes coordinated with external watchdog supervision
- Structured lightweight, bandwidth-efficient JSON telemetry payloads over secure cloud sockets
Domain & Context Representation
CONTEXTUAL FIELD COVER
Technology Stack
Microcontroller
Sensing & GNSS
Connectivity
Outcome & Purpose
Achieved stable autonomous telemetry reporting in long-duration field trials with predictable battery endurance under fluctuating cellular coverage.
Interested in discussing this implementation?
I discuss technical architecture, system design tradeoffs, and operational reliability in direct interviews.