Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi all.

I've been fiddling with Arduino's for a bit now, and I have all the temps from the coolrooms/freezers/fridges at work going through the net. So I thought it'd be a good idea to do the same with the Aquaponics!

https://xively.com/feeds/352242277


It's using cheap waterproof one-wire temp sensors, one measuring the Air temp/Tank Temp/ Return Line Temp, and an ultrasonic sensor to track the water levels in the sump (it tells me how many Litres are in the tank), so I know when I need to refill the tank.

It's all going into an Arduino Uno.

When I get a rain water tank, I'll be hooking it into a solenoid, and when the water is at a certain level, it'll auto refill.

I'm waiting for a wifi repeater to arrive (little router, $25 worth, you plug the ethernet cable into it). So at the moment it's sitting on top of the fridge, but it's live, and I can see how it works for a period without being outside.

EDIT...

I should also mention, I can set triggers, so if the temps/sump levels are over or under a certain threshold, it'll email me with an alert.

did you come here to tease me?

Yes, yes I did.

Plus I like to be lazy

Mrs Charlie often asks me when I will come to my senses...

Well I sort of have my sensors all up and running. But the wifi repeater, or my router/modem is stuffing up. It'll work for a short period, and then just stops working. Half the time it takes out my modem at the same time, and won't start up until I restart the routers. I'll try support tomorrow.

But have a look at the link my my signature. The sump is quite interesting, you can see the volume going up and down (if you click on raw data points, you can see the exact readings.).

Hi Columnmn,

Really cool stuff! I love your Xively feed. Here is mine to my green house: https://xively.com/feeds/1205695996

Can you tell me a bit more about the picture of the plastic-enclosed device with the black, blue and white cables? Is that the Arduino or perhaps a sensor? You said something about a one-wire device?

In the past, I have tried to get the Arduino working with MQTT using the Xively interface so that I can publish my sensor values while also subscribing to other feeds (for remote commands and other distant sensors). My experience was that programming the arduino to deal with both of these functions was painful. I ran into constant resets of the Arduino.

In the end, I moved everything to a Raspberry Pi and it was easy to get working. A $10 USB dongle was really easy to install on the RPI. No weird resets. The uptime of the PI is now approaching 130 days!

Here is a article on how the basic system was built:http://paago.org/xively/83/measuring-temperature-with-a-raspberry-pi

Regards,

Mark

The plastic enclosed device is a big ticket item:

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Hot-Ultrason ... 53efa170b8

It's a ultrasonic ping sensor. So it sends a ping to the water level, calculates how long it takes to return the ping and figures out the distance, then I just did a little math to convert it into volume. Then I just coated everything apart from the speaker & receiver underneath with hot glue to waterproof it.

The one wire device is the temp sensors.

My problems aren't with the arduino resetting, it's with the router bridge (although a usb dongle would make that easier I'd imagine). I tried using webserver on the arduino, but it was dodgy. I plan on doing more with the arduino though, automating refilling from a rain water tank/ fill and empty digester tank. I think that sort of stuff is easier with the arduino. I want to set it up and ignore it. Plus I've already learnt the language, I don't like the idea of learning another.

However, I am very curious about your other sensors on there. The PH, NH1, NO2 and NO3. I saw a few very expensive PH sensors, but I couldn't find anything for the others.

What are you using for them?

And are they staying accurate over a longer period of time?

Wow - that'd be great. Unfortunately I'm not smart enough to do it. However I did use a wireless pool thermometer all winter that told me the air and water temp in the greenhouse. But then it sank and started giving me weird readings. I pulled it and used a hair dryer to dry it out good but it is still telling me the water temp is 102 degrees. We keep our hot tub at 102 degrees, I'm not fooled. That water is cold to the touch. I just ordered me another one. The air temp portion is still working fine.

It's not all that tricky to set up.

Just the code is the hardest part, but once you figure it out, there will be plenty more things you could do with it.

Columnmn. Arduino is a subset of the C language. If you can program arduino you can program simple c programs. Also, Rpi runs a linux operating system, from what I saw on mark's description site, he could do almost everything through provided Linux scripts and programs, you would mostly get by with understanding Linux command line.

I still like the arduino. Have a play with one, they are really quite simple to use.

I just started with zero programming experience of any kind. So it made it tricker to begin with.

But now, I just have to plug in the sensor, download the library, upload to the device, and it's good to go.

Nice work CBB, that's exactly what I want to set up on my systems. My arduino starter kit is in transit.

Do you get any false readings with the transducer water level sensor? Was about to plonk down $50 for an eTape, but if the sensor is accurate enough I'll go with that.

I get the odd false reading, but I think it's from water splashing around it. 99.999% of the time, it's perfect.

For $3 a sensor delivered, it's worth trying.

Just make sure you keep it waterproofed. I surrounded it all in hot glue, but if the water runs into the speakers below, it stops it from working in a while. Seems to start back up once dry.

One other thing I should include. It'd be so much easier to put a float valve connected to a rain water tank. It'll keep the water level that much more steady. And you don't need to worry about the water level.

Which arduino kit did you get?