Coming from over 10 years of experience in cave monitoring, Gruppo Speleologico Talpe del Carso has designed Riki and Dolphin: customizable, cheap, and easy to assemble tools for getting real time data transmission from the bottom of a cave, even underwater, to a webserver. Their use has been tested to demonstrate the existence of a rare air temperature phenomenon inside the Abisso Bonetti cave (Classical Karst, Italy). The Dolphin device can be planted hundreds of meters deep inside a cave, transmitting data with standard Modbus protocol over an Ethernet cable to Riki, the external ground station, which also supplies power to the entire system. Riki then sends data through the LoRaWAN network straight to a webserver for data collection and visualization in real time. This allows cavers to enter the cave once, and then get data every few minutes ideally forever. Indeed, the battery lasts many months and then it can be replaced without entering the cave (because it’s placed outside the entrance). It’s even possible to setup alerts to get immediate notifications (email, Telegram, etc…) when some events happen. The Riki-Dolphin-Dragino-Grafana is a fully integrated solution, where each step is documented and released as Free Open Source hardware and software.
Check out our paper published on the peer reviewed International Journal of Speleology: