Introduction - David Haldane

Hello all,

I am a prior freshwater hobbyist who is new to saltwater. My fiance and I recently moved to the Quad Cities from Chicago and I am celebrating the increase in housing space (and decrease in housing costs!) with a saltwater tank! I am in the process of bringing up a 57 gallon Deep Blue rimless with a 20 gallon sump. I work as a software developer and am particularly interested in smart aquarium monitoring and DIY. I look forward to participating in the GIRS!

 

Welcome to the community!

 

Welcome David!! You are lucky to be living where you are. A couple of real nice fish stores in your area.

 

Welcome to GIRS..

 

Hi and welcome to GIRS! I am a Software Engineering major at ISU and am currently working on a DIY controller. If you like doing more electrical work you can use an arduino and buy a wifi shield or buy and arduino with wifi embedded which is what I did. The other option is Reef-Pi, which uses a raspberry pi and is completely open source! I opted for the arduino route because I wanted to write all of my own code (and brush up on my C) as well as learn as much as possible while I did it!

 

Awesome! I've been weighing the benefits of using an Arduino (I own a few) vs getting in to the Reef-pi scene. Being able to slam install a controller on a Raspberry Pi is tempting Where are you in your development stage? Have you integrated any probes yet?

 

At this point the only probes I've got are temperature sensors (DS18B20 Waterproof). Multiple of these can be put together on one bus for redundancy. I've also added a controller for up to 4 independent power switches for powerheads/dosers/ATO. I've got code written for an Auto Top Off as well and am waiting for the sensor for that. The biggest part for me is that I'll be away from my tank often and for extended periods of time so I have made the arduino an IoT device that communicates with AWS. I am also building a web app (maybe a mobile app) to monitor the tank from anywhere using the AWS info. I would definitely add more sensors if I wasn't a broke college student, pH and other chemical sensors are all pricey especially if you want to be accurate. Overall I have a working setup, I'm just constantly adding to it

 

Very cool! I can confirm that after doing a bit of research other essential sensors are pricey... so much so that after doing the math it almost seems as though the price savings of a DIY project are minimal compared to just buying an Apex , but there's a satisfaction with DIY that does not exist with an out-of-the-box solution.