Smart water meter with ultrasonic flow sensing, NB-IoT connectivity, and AI-powered leak pattern recognition.

A municipal water utility seeking to deploy 100,000 smart water meters for real-time consumption monitoring and leak detection across the city.
Developing a battery-operated ultrasonic water meter that maintains ±1% accuracy across flow rates from 1L/h to 5000L/h, with 10-year battery life and NB-IoT connectivity in underground pits.
The system uses an STM32L4 ultra-low-power MCU paired with a u-blox SARA-R5 NB-IoT modem. An ultrasonic transducer pair measures Time-of-Flight differential for flow calculation.
Flow measurement uses the STM32L4's high-resolution timer capturing TOF at 1ps resolution. A proprietary adaptive sampling algorithm reduces measurements to one per minute during periods of no flow. Leak detection uses a TinyML model trained on 10,000 hours of flow profiles, identifying continuous micro-flow patterns indicative of pipe leaks.
±1% accuracy across full flow range. 10-year battery life. 98% leak detection accuracy.
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