Design and Implementation of an IoT-Based Gas Leakage Detector Using Arduino Microcontroller

Abstract

This paper presents the Design and Implementation of an IoT-based gas leakage detector using an Arduino microcontroller. This was borne out of the concern of the rampant fire incidents in homes and other areas of gas usage, and the need to develop a system to mitigate this. The methodology consists of two parts, namely the hardware and the software. The hardware involves the use of an Atmega328P microcontroller for both data acquisition and control. The controller was interfaced with the gas sensor MQ2, a thermistor for temperature monitoring, an LCD, a servomotor for regulating the gas supply, a buzzer, and an ESP8266 Wifi module for connecting to an IoT server. The software implementation involves the programming of the microcontroller using C++ programming language in an Arduino IDE environment and the configuration of the Blynk platform through the IoT to receive monitored readings of the system’s sensors. The system was tested for efficiency and accuracy. The results of the test on the efficiency of the system showed that it takes between 1.44s to 75.66s for gas leakage to be detected and acted on by the microcontroller and 3.3s to 66.5s for temperature increase to be detected and acted on by the microcontroller with a distance range of 0 to 25cm in the case of the gas sensor and 0 to 6cm in the case of the temperature sensor respectively. The result also showed that the microcontroller was able to receive data from the various sensors and control the servomotor accordingly. This shows that the developed prototype is reliable and efficient.