Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi everyone,

Great forum. My friend and I have just about built our aquaponics setup. I have arduino as i wish to monitor and control the process. I have very little programming knowledge. Has anyone had experience with Ardublock (the graphical arduino programmer)?

If so, is it suitable for aquaponics? ie does have enough features for this task, can it connect wifi shield to recieve information over the internet?

here is the link to the ardublock website
http://blog.ardublock.com/

Thanks everyone and hopefully those of you that dont yet know of the program get something out of it.

This reads a little like an ad for that site, but generally speaking, I think if you have to learn this programming method from scratch, you might as well just learn C.

Cut and paste makes everything possible.

Haha no it's not an ad, not that it would matter anyway, it's open source freeware. Though thanks for the reply.

I will continue learning c unless others have any more feedback.

Cheers

I'd say just learn c++, and start with regular arduino programming. There is far more tutorials, and help available. It'll do everything you want to do with it

And yes, cut and paste is your friend.

Make it a project, figure out what you want to do, what you want to measure. And then get each part working by itself, then combine them

The nice thing about arduino is that for a project that you would like to do. There is a good chance that someone has done something very similar and has a sketch for it. Like what I did when I found a sketch for a SD card temperature logger and editing it to log a 3 axis accelerometer instead and have it also display to a LCD display.

The hard part of getting it to work is out there. This can also help or be a real pain if there are no comments to what part does what and you have to go from scratch. Either for the code itself or reading what someone else has done.

Hi cebenestelli,

I do a fair amount of prototyping with both Arduino and the Raspberry pi. It is great to hear about projects that combine Maker projects with Aquaponics.

For learning basic electronics and embedded coding, I would recommend the Arduino. This is especially true if you are building a closed system device that senses and actuates in a small package. For example, a thermostat or a fan controlled humidity sensor. These make for great Arduino projects.

If you are building a network-based device, that has any connectivity to the outside world, I would put the Arduino to the side and use a Raspberry Pi. The reason for this is the maturity of the Linux software stack and all the open source packages that can make the internet of things a reality. For example, getting a TCP/IP stack to do useful and reliable things on an Arduino is painful. It nearly requires that you write an operating system in Sketch to get basic functionality working. It is a no brainer with a Raspberry pi.

All of your programming in the PI can be done with more modern languages such at Python and Node.js (Javascript). Learning C is like learning Latin and there are reasons to do it if you want to research comparative languages. Focusing on Python, PHP and Javascript is a more pragmatic path IMO.

Back to the topic.

Last summer, I decided I wanted to build an aquaponics greenhouse so that my fish and plants would survive the Dutch winter. I travel a lot and needed a way to monitor and actuate activity from a web browser. The sensors I wanted to have included 3 temperature sensors (inside air, outside air, water), an inside humidity sensor, a light sensor and a sensor to verify that my Bell Siphon is working. I also wanted to control a ventalation fan and growlights remotely. Finally, I wanted to have the sensor data and images of the grow bed uploaded to a web server so that I can following everything on a web page. With the Raspberry pi, I speny around $150 for all the kit I needed and there was very little software to write.

The system is online at http://paago.org/aquaponics

Below is a basic architecture.



Anyway, I wish you a lot of luck with your project. Whatever platform you choose, please be sure to share your progress! We all love this sort of Maker Aquapoinics banter.

Mark