# Project - Aquarium Remote Monitor



## harveysburger (Feb 16, 2009)

Hi,

I was wondering if any of you dabbled with Raspberry Pi or Arduino projects and created something useful in terms of aquarium monitoring? If so how far did you get? Temperature monitoring? pH? Water leak alerts? etc... 
Mobile app perhaps?

For my part I started recently and it's been very interesting. I am a software developer so that part was easy despite being rusty in C (understatement)... but since I had no experience in the field of electronic and long forgotten basic concepts about electricity, etc... my progress has been rather slow... but fun nonetheless!

Long story short I can now monitor my aquarium temperature remotely and get alerts if the temperature crosses a certain threshold, etc...

You can view the feed on thingspeak's website or consume it in one of the many free compatible mobile apps

https://thingspeak.com/channels/314103

From mobile apps you can chart temperature overtime and do a bunch of extra things

Next steps will be adding water level monitoring (for my sump... I want an alert if the water in the return chamber gets too low)

Claude


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## fishyfishy (Apr 21, 2011)

harveysburger said:


> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering if any of you dabbled with Raspberry Pi or Arduino projects and created something useful in terms of aquarium monitoring? If so how far did you get? Temperature monitoring? pH? Water leak alerts? etc...
> Mobile app perhaps?
> ...


that's awesome. I've been wanting to build a full aquarium controller. I just can't decide on a pi or arduino for what I want to do. I also want to add lighting controll to the same controller.

Sent from my SM-T113 using Tapatalk


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## harveysburger (Feb 16, 2009)

Definitely a pi is more powerful, and it does more out of the box. But more expensive, consumes more power, etc... Arduino is very bare bone. Pi is more like a mini computer... You can run Linux on them! 

For my part I was very interested in working with those more basic components and try to learn my way from there. Having a lot of fun with this 

I just ordered nodemcu boards which are still very cheap, more powerful than arduino and come with Wi-Fi built in. But you have the program in Lua instead of C.


If you get into this share your progress


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## fishyfishy (Apr 21, 2011)

Sorry its taken so long but I finally got around to picking up some equipment.

I picked up a Pi3, an Arduino Mega, a temperature sensor and relay board.

I currently have the Arduino mega controlling a relay board that is turning my heater on and off based on a user defined temperature.

The Arduino is relaying the information back to the Pi and the Pi is used for the user interface.

I am currently working on the coding to automate liquid fertilizer dosing and next I'm hoping to work on co2 and pH monitoring if I can find sensors at a decent price.

When that is all done I will attempt to create a graphical user interface to make it look nice and pretty.


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## hibackgold (Oct 14, 2017)

i came across this recently...i guess its similar to what it is you are designing...

https://www.level-sense.com/products/level-sense-pro


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## fishyfishy (Apr 21, 2011)

No not exactly... That is a water level sensor. I have considered adding a similar sensor to my controller to help with automatic top offs or to automate water changes, but I am a bit scared of something like that failing and flooding the room.

If I can find a 100% reliable sensor and valve I may tinker with it.


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