Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

So in your Arduino Mega 2560 how many sensors can it take inputs from? And of what sort?

That is a very complex question.From a hardware perspective, the mega has 70 input/output pins. Of those, 54 are digital, 16 are analog inputs and 4 are hardware serial ports. It also support I2C with a theoretical limit of 128 devices on just 2 pins and SPI with no theoretical limit to the number of devices that can be daisy chained.

If you are limited by I/O, you can always multiplex signals for even more digital I/O.

I would go out on a limb and say that any sensor, interface, display or input device you can find on the market can be interfaced to the arduino.

To give you perspective. On this project, I have 19 I/O pins left open of the original 70.

On top of that all your temp probes can be run from just one digital pin so as Chiumanfu said if you choose your devices carefully you may not run out for our purposes.

Grovestreams has recently added a bunch of new features... one of which is embedded HTML widgets. I added a webcam stream and weather forecast to my dashboard.

For those who are interested. Here is the updated power board schematic.

Is the webcam through the arduino?

I've really got to get my arduino up and running again.

Hi all. Just a warning for those using the Atlas DO and PH probes. When I read that the probe could be submerge for prolonged periods I took that quite literally. Up until a month ago I had both probes submerged about 500mm deep.

For the last month they have both been floating in a raft on the water surface and now I can report both read correctly. This is why my testing worked in a shallow bucket but resulted in false readings in the fish tanks.

Talk about stupid ideas.

Are you saying that they won't work at depth?

So I can't measure the DO 1m down with an Atlas probe?

Really?

Crap!

Have you talked to Atlas about this?

Hi Stuart.

In my case that is what it looks like. Both probes have a small hole on the top of the probe housing and I suspect that may be the issue. I will have some time next week to play so I may try to seal the end of the prob. That may cause its own issues. We will see.

I think these probes are designed to go in the fluid flow and not in the tanks.

It would be a good idea to send an email to Atlas to find out before you fiddle with them.

No, it is a cheap Foscam IP PTZ camera streaming to the widget on Grovestreams. Nothing to do with the Arduino.



When I get my IBC filled up, I will test and let you know if my results are the same. Both probe datasheets say the probe can be submerged all the way to the BNC connector so you would think it would work ok.

Today I added a menu branch to allow me to enter the measured ammonia, nitrite and nitrate values. I haven't been able to find sensors to measure these parameters automatically so they will have to be sampled with my API master test kit and the value entered manually. I think this is important info to keep track of.







Adding these three parameters to Grovestreams bumped this project up past the 20 stream limit for the free account. Grovestreams charges $0.05 per additional stream per month. I think being able to graph the status of ammonia, nitrite and nitrate and compare to things like dissolved oxygen and water temperature is well worth $1.80/year.

Or maybe I'll ditch the sump temperature sensor and growbed temperature sensors and stay under the free limit. What do you guys think?

Just wanted to give you another prod towards contacting Atlas. They are really friendly and want to help. I 've had several email conversations with them.

Stuart.

Yes I find them quite help full when I first had issues. I will see how time goes. But for the moment I am getting good results with values as expected. The PH probe results match my manual readings taken as a check.

Chiumanfu

I use a server to collect the data from the Arduino. Then have a desktop application to read and graph the results from the database. It will also allow for manual entry of additional data.

I have tried many scenarios before. The reason I like grovestreams (or any cloud based IOT platform) is that I can call up my data from anywhere, at anytime. This is important for me because the main purpose of this whole thing is so I can monitor the system when I am out of town (which happens a lot).

I'm not a fan of running a computer 24/7 as a local server. I did that for a very long time and got sick of maintaining it... updating apache, php, perl, mysql, phpmyadmin and worrying about dynamic DNS and all that.

Another alternative is nimbits which is really nice because it can run on Google App Engine. When I have more time, I'm going to look into this one deeper.