A few words about this project

Preface

The municipality of Niederweningen operates a public swimming pool. The main swimming pool has a length of 50 meters and 4 lanes. Next to the main pool is a smaller pool for kids with a huge water slide. Those two main pools are connected via water pipes, so that the same water body is circulating through the separated pools.
This pool is opened from May to September. The water temperature varies according to the weather. It can be as cold as 15 degrees and reach up to 25 degrees Celsius on a sunny week.

In the past

The municipality of Niederweningen used to publish the current water temperature on their web site. This task was done manually and consisted of the following steps:
1. The lifeguard manually measured the water temperature using a thermometer.
2. Subsequently the lifeguard wrote the reading onto the chalk board at the pool entrance and
3. communicated the reading to the city hall by telephone.
4. The person in the city hall updated the HTML page with the newly measured value.

This approach works so far. However there are some drawbacks. It is work intensive as different actors have to work hand in glove. The person in charge of updating the internet site also needs to be available on weekends and holidays - the time when most guests will consult the municipality webpage in order to make an informed decision on whether to go to the pool. The current process is error prone as the water temperature value is processed manually - a task which is also quite tedious.

Using TMOR

The above described weak points have been eliminated by using TMOR. The following benefits was achieved:
A) Valuable man power can be freed for more rewarding tasks
B) Next to water temperature, additional values of interest can be published - such as the air temperature (this with little effort)
C) The values can be measured in short time intervals - all data captured is stored in a data base
D) Data base information can be used for extensive data analysis - It provides the essential foundation for business intelligence
E) Out of the box presentation abilities provide more attractive/meaningful data presentation for the pool visitor than the current one number display

TMOR's benefits do not come for free. The pool needs to be 'teched up' with a TMOR base station and eventually one or two bricks. An initial effort was needed to locate the ideal place for data collection - where will the water temperature be measured. Next to that, the TMOR base stations had to be integrated into the pool wifi. Unfortunately, the web server hosting the Niederweningen web page does not accept ftp from TMOR. The data is published on http://niederweningen.tmor.ch dedicated web page to publish the values the data.

The current published pool water temperatures and all its analysis can be seen here.