Arduino and your tank

Any Arduino hackers using these devices to do something sexy for the tank(s) they have? I am thinking of getting back into the micro prog game and marrying an Arduino project with this hobby seems natural. I would assume the salty crew would have more use, but still could be a nice chalange.

What would you want monitored and logged for your tank(s).

Later Ferdie

 

Here are a list of things that have already caught my eye:

Power meter / logger
Temp meter / logger
ph meter / logger
water level (alert, act and log) (touch less or sensor strip)


Not sure on effort involved but it does seem doable. (Wonder if how on could do CO2,No3 etc .. )

Still digging.

Later Ferdie

 

I think the reef angel open source aquarium controller is based on arduino. A couple of guys have their own arduino controllers on masa though.

 

Reef angel does look very cool .. thanks for the info I'll go dig on MASA also.

The reef angel seems to focus on automating things, dosing, lights etc ... I am more about logging it for analysis later, lets see how it goes.

Later Ferdie

 

Hmm,maybe nitrates and amonia? The nasty stuff. I would get this if I kept things like sting rays

 

I am going to go digging in the hydroponics sensor side of things ... would love to know what is really going on in my tanks without needing to invest in a colour interpretor.

 

Hmm - what about daylight detection ... i.e. sync the lights and CO2 to real daylight time in our hemisphere, Ok true I could use a sunrise function to get the calculated values - then always switch CO2 X minutes on before sun rise and Y minutes before sunset.


Now I just need to get a board and start playing.

Later F

 

just actually ordered 2 arduinos and accesories on thursday. Gonna start off with wireless control of lights and data logging for temp initially. Will be an ever expanding project though.

 

Cool @Jagwa .. who you getting yours from?

 

@f-fish micro robotics, they deliver the next day if you order before 12. It is a bit more expensive than ebay but i think its just easier to get it from a local supplier

 

yeah - also very good price from what I can see

 

botshop has some nice sensors that seem well priced

 

they do have nice sensors, I think it would be cheaper to just buy an LM35 and put it in some waterproof resin or something that has good heat conduction for a temp sensor. The moisture sensor could work for an auto top up system however you would need to check how it works case it shocks the fish or something. There was a guy on MASA that also bought some ph probes to monitor his ph which sounds pretty cool. Not sure how we could monitor ammonia but seneye have a nice tank monitoring system and they seem to be able to do it with replacable slides. Now just to find out how...

 

My issue with pH probes is how often you need to calibrate them. And for temperature I like to use a simple thermistor, but LM35 would also work. Just get a cheap PT100 probe, easy to work with and completely submersible.

For auto top-up I would use either a read switch with a floating magnet or rather just a simple liquid detecting circuit, the couple of milliamps won't hurt your fish. Or you could use a ultrasonic range finder under the hood. Both the first and third ideas will be able to calculate how much water needs to be be mixed, heated and pumped in, while the second one will one be coupled with a simple on-off controller and not a Proportional or PID controller.

If you do find some nice sensors, let me know, I'm busy with an open source logger based on a PIC18F that will be able to do some dosing etc as well.

 

I would pay good money for the Seneye,if only to get the PAR meter.
A decent Co2 meter would really be nice.

 

@DigiGram I was looking at the ultrasonic ... thought it would be cool to also calculate evaporation, sure we could use that value for something. @Rudi , I hear you on the PAR meter - take the guest work out of what lights really work and ditto on the CO2. Yeah the PH probes do not seem sustainable, hate the idea of doing calibrations.

 

Great ideas guys.
I was thinking of doing something similaor with a Raspberry PI.
Sort of something like logging at the readings to a DB and then drawing stats, trends, tests, etc. from it.

 

Yeah the PI is good, but lacks some IO and communication stuff. What is very possible is to use the arduino as the IO and sensoring device, then pass that onto your PI.

BTW if you have no clue what arduino is and fail to use google to find non fishy stuff .. Massimo Banzi: How Arduino is open-sourcing imagination | Video on TED.com watch this 16 min TED Talk

Later Ferdie

 

That was one awesome TED talk! Was glad when Google Reader dumped this in my download queue from the TED site. Almost made me buy a Arduino, then I saw the price lol. For now I'll design mine from a PIC18F4550, maybe upgrade it later on. Currently my design issue is how to reliably dispense a small quantity of test kit drops into a sampling container, without ending up costing R10'000, or taking up more space than your tank. Thought of using a Hamilton micro-syringe coupled with a conveyer belt effect. Those that know how a GC works, the idea is to mimic the auto sampler and carousel from a GC.

The design phase of my colour comparator is done for now, just need to build it, hopefully this week and test it on my next tank test, to see if it can deduce the same value from the colour chart my eyes can.

 

you can also try netram, got mine from them.