Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I'm reading as much as I can at the moment. PICAXE does seem to be well supported. I juust found yet more manuals.

They had some no hotmail address allowed policy going on so I had some login problems, but I had an "everythings fixed" email within an hour.

some interesting links there guys thanks

hey TC anychance i could have a look at your timer program to see how mine compares to it ??

Cheers
pete

it seems the people at PICAXE have made the descision for me...

http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/docs/axe401.pdf

it turns out they have a shield base that enables you to plug in all that excellent premade Arduino stuff, so I've decided to go with PICAXE. In fact I just bought my first kit.

Buy direct from PICAXE if you can wait (I'm told it takes 8 days to australia) I just paid 3 times the price I could have got it direct from the picaxe people even with postage. And even then I didnt get what I thought I was getting.

That might be just my local electronics store, or that the oz dollar is good at the moment, but from what I've read the picaxe people seem to be a really good company as far far as price and delivery go.

If anyone in the distant future reads this thread and wants a friend on the picaxe forum, I'm there as user - 120thingsin20years. But wait a few years before you ask me anything, because I know nothing so far

I plan on keeping all my posts in my first thread... to keep it like a system thread here. My first post caused a few negative comments, but everyone seems nice enough. Apparently it's normal to use titles that relate to the subject at hand, so my first post titled ...

For sale.Cold fusion reactor.Home made.Not working.$2000 ONO

Didn't go down as well as it might have.

But the people seem very helpful in spite of my poor start.

I think we need an electronics sticky here. Do we have one?

I'll check.

You may want to look into the Teensy from pjrc.com. Very easy to use and the code can be uploaded with the USB without having to buy any special programming interfaces. It has an Arduino mode. I don't use this mode by do good-ole C programming with it so you can use all the pins. It may be a bit too hard-core for the hobbyist, but I like it. I've never used the PIC....

Hey, web4deb. I've been looking through your posts here over the last 2 or 3 days.

Why no system thread?

I found a video of yours on youtube of a sequencer, and thought I'd look it up on here, but couldn't find it.

I found a stack of other interesting stuff though.

In fact I just finished typing a reply to my picaxe thread that will see my first project being a "drill bit" feeder. I made one a while ago thinking I was being very original, but then found your's a few days ago when going over your old posts.

Oh well. I was clever and original for a year at least

Teensy looks interesting

I bought a PICAXE kit today. Just a little 8 pin proto board. Cost 23$, around 4 times as much as I could of had it delivered from the PICAXE people in the UK.

Its funny when you buy a $2 chip that out-performs your first $3000 computer.

Now I need to learn how to solder.

I'm willing to bet it wont still outperfom my first computer when I've finished fusing the entire board into a lump of tin.

Can I recommend a DIP Socket for the chips until you are pretty good at soldering.
Semiconductors, especially ICs, are very heat sensitive, and people learning how to solder generally cook them.

You need a hot soldering iron to solder semi conductors.
If the iron isnt hot enough you have heat on the component for longer trying to get the solder to melt.
You should be able to solder a pin in less than a second.

I used to solder 250+ Pin surface mount ICs on sensitive circuit boards.
Always have high heat and add plenty of solder.
The more solder you add, the more flux, the better the join.
The excess should drip off and leave a good join.
Too cold an iron will leave a blob, which is bad.

is that one of these the the chip plugs into?

if so, lucky for me I thought you always had to use one

Thats the one.
You'll know when you are way too slow soldering because the plastic will melt!

Hi all, I'm just starting my arduino project


The target is to build a greenhouse + aquaponics monitoring and operating system that features:

measurement:
- airtemp. outside
- airtemp inside
- system water temp.
- thermal mass water temp.
- humidity inside
- humiditry outside
- sunlight
- window open status
- door open status

other inputs needed for fish feeding:
- food conversion curve for the fish specie to water temp and fish size
- fish avg. weight
- pieces

my base system should be able to controll:
- greenhouse ventilation according to temps and hummidity rates
- automatic fish feeder with close to ideal feed rates
- alarm in case of low water flow or low system water level
- save data SD card or to your computer
- serve data to web for real time monitoring
- send alarms to your twitter/email/cellphone


This is my starter kit i have ordered:
- Arduino mega2560: Its a big and fast base board thats more than enough for the everithing I can now imagine: ~35 USD

- Ethernet shield with micro-SD: This extra enables the arduino board to be a little webserver, and record data to micro-SD card: ~25 USD

- RTC clock: This extra enables the arduino board to record the real time and date to all data that it records: ~10 USD

Need to by:
Need sensors (3x thermal +1x waterproof thermal, 1x photocell for sunlight, 2x humindity, 2x magnetic contact switch) wires, reducers, battery box, casing: ~30 USD

Glad to find this topic.

I have some programing knowledge and for first sight wiring is simple and logical to me.

Cool!

How do you measure humidity?

If your board supports Maxim 1-wire bus you can order their temp sensors as samples free from their website. I think the maximum cable length is around 14 feet so you can run pretty decent length cable runs.

The Arduino has a 1-wire library which makes it super simple to connect up temp sensors.

Ive had PICAXE aswell as Arduino, the one main thing I like about Arduino is the bootloader is open source, so I can buy any ATmega 168, 328, ATTiny or other supported chips and burn the bootloader myself, means I dont have to actually buy the chip from PICAXE.

After a while of using Arduino, especially with ethernet module is that the code library + bootloader takes up so much room, which is when I started playing with AVRstudio. I took the bootloader off my chip and compile it myself through AVRstudio. More commands and space, but a bigger learning curve.

You can get heaps of different sensors, here are just a few from sparkfun:
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8257 - Humidity and Temp sensor
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10239 - Humidity Sensor
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9694 - Barometric Pressure Sensor
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/245 - Dallas 1 wire sensors

There is lots of information around about using these on Arduino. Im not into the PICAXE much anymore, but im sure there are plenty of people who have used them.

From there you can even go as far as measuring water volume by weight using pressure sensors on the feet of the tank, water flow meters which could sound an alarm if flow rate drops which could also enable a second backup system, Auto roof shutters in greenhouse. There is really no limit with what you can do as long as you have enough room on the chip and enough I/O.