DIY Aquarium Monitor

[Aquastudent]

Hello WAMAS. Looking forward to next week's meeting.

 

I have been brainstorming and researching for the past few months on building a custom aquarium controller using an arduino. This first build would be for a freshwater tank but the concepts can be expanded to a marine system in the future.

 

Right now the design would be to:

 

• monitor tank temperature (possibly at multiple locations, perhaps top and bottom)
• monitor room temperature
• use the tank temperature to control the heaters and prevent over-heating
• temperature status lights to visually alert if the temperature is out of the desired range (Blue=cold, green=happy, red=hot)
• float-switch to notify if water level drops (leak)
• webcam image of the aquarium
• organize all the data into an excel file and automatically email daily updates, track changes
• automatically send an email alarm if one of the above triggers fires

 

Other features I would like to include but am not sure of the best way to do it is a pH, ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate probes. If used on a planted tank the gH, kH, and dissolved C02 would also be nice to track.

 

Some measurements that may be nice to track over time or features to include on a reef monitor that I could think of would be:

 

• Salinity
• Conductivity
• Calcium
• PAR meter (although this may be difficult to hide)
• Some alert on a protein skimmer?
• light controls (this wouldn't work with my current systems but if you built them together from the start this would be nice)
• pump controls

 

I'm curious, what would you like to have automatically tracked in your aquarium?

 

If anybody has any experience with this type of project I would love to discuss it with you.