About This Project
I had been out of the Aquarium keeping hobby for quite some time. But because I now had an office at home, I wanted to set something up that I could enjoy on the long phone calls or thinking time. I had discovered that the hobby had move on quite a bit without me and the new trend was to automate the daily maintenance of your tank. Having come to the point in my life where I wanted to enjoy more than become a slave to my hobby, I decided to embark on the journey of automating the routine tasks. My journey had taken me off into Netduino, then an open source project called Reef Angel. (which I am currently using) My only problem is that it was more geared towards saltwater tanks and the ability to get other things to play together with it seemed too limiting. So, I started looking for other projects that would provided the necessary framework to do the things I wanted it to do. I had all the beads, I just needed some great thread! One of those frameworks was OpenHab2. I thought it was amazing when I first kicked the tires. I bought a Pi, setup a server and began to create some beads. It seemed to hit a roadblock pretty quickly so I kept looking. That is when I stumbled back into Cayenne. I had seen it in print before but never delved into it. What a mistake! I am into it less than 10 hrs of effort and already have over 1/2 of my beads sewn into the fabric with either a proof of concept or the actual way I figured I would do it. This contest has only added fuel to the fire as I am expecting that there will likely be a bit of extra support to help overcome a couple hurdles of the weird things I would be doing.
What’s Connected
Arduino Uno
RPi 3 (maybe?)
ADS1115 - some type of distance sensor to monitor water level and trigger Automated Top Off (ATO) and refills after automated water changes
DS2408 - to drive Relay bank
PCA9685 - PWM to drive dosing pumps, stir plates, Drain pump, LED lighting (may just use Arduino directly)
1wire Temp Sensor
New Sensors
PH Probe
DIY Electrical Conductivity probe
Rope Leak Detector
Triggers & Alerts
Water level reaches Current Level - a certain amount and shuts off Drain and returns ATO and Filter back to normal function and then starts the Dosing Cycle
Dosing Cycle will turn off the Stir Plates and then run each of the fertilizer amounts using Peristaltic Dosing Pumps for a metered time at a rate determined by the PWM % sent to them. After this is completed, the cycle is complete.
ATO will continue to run until the tank returns to the Full height.
Eventually I want EC to determine frequency of water changes and Fertilizer Dosing
Alerts
Rope Leak Detector senses water - email and SMS
Temp rises above 90 F
Water Level rises above Max
Water Level remains below Min for over hr
Scheduling
Each morning at 6am schedules will kick off the Water Change Process by turning on a drain pump and Stir Plates on the Fertilizer containers and turning off the Filter and ATO
LEDs start up at 9am @15% PWM and increase 4 times to 100% with additional entries and then decrease 4 times back to 0%
T5 tubes come on at 11am and stay on until 3pm
Dashboard Screenshots
(Paste screenshots of dashboard, mobile app, triggers & alerts, scheduling)
Photos of the Project
Coming Soon
Video
Coming Soon
You’ll find a group of fellow makers interested and ready to help here. Definitely a contender for the grand prize once you get it completed. Good luck and I look forward to watching this project progress!