Tank Build! SaltyPi Controller

Hello Everyone and thank you for clicking on the read more link.

First off I have been away from GIRS for a while. Need to renew my subscription I see. Anyway... Here is the latest crazy idea I've been toying with.

Purchased a Raspberry PI starter kit from Amazon with all the basic needs - power supply, break out board with cable, jump wires, 8GB card, wireless adapter, and some other odds and ends. Ran me about $90 when I bought it a couple months ago.

Installed Raspbian. Trying to pick either Apache or NGINX for my web server still. Plan is to have the whole thing ran via a web page that can be accessed on the Internet, later I'll have an app.

Phidgets.com has made these wonderful USB toys for the PI and any other operating system with drivers and sample code right on the product page. Makes life so much easier when trying to program something.

I'm trying to learn Python. If anyone knows or understands it pretty please inbox me so I can pick your brain.

Plan is to order up the USB temp probes or maybe a temp board where I can house 4 temp senors on 1 USB connection. (1 for DT, 1 for Sump, and 1 for AI SOLs but they really don't get hot and never have there fans kick on even (should I be worried about that?), and then I'd have a spare or could use it for room temp monitoring.)

Trying to figure out what all I want to be able to do. Need to interface the AI SOLs to it for scheduling of lights on/off. Would love a lot of things but might be complicating things with all the add-ons like flow control monitoring for the returns into the DT and to the Skimmer. I want to have an auto feeder as I'm gone for work a lot and the women of the house forget to feed or over feed the tank when I leave them in charge of it. So with the auto feeder I want the power heads to reduce flow or maybe shut down for 5 minutes or so.

Also looking to monitor pH which is another USB add on. Not sure if ORP is really needed or not. Someone chime in on that for me please. Still researching it.

That looks like a good start for a conversation so feedback please! Also I am trying to keep the cost down so I could potentially sell it as a kit for people to put together instead of the expensive cost of an Apex or ReefKeeper (no offense to those that own them. I just cant justify the cost.)

 

At least you know a programming language lol. I'm a web guy so learning python is a bit harder than I was told. I also agree that temp and ph probes should be universal by now. A simple USB device would make life so much easier for everybody. Hoping to maybe get my Pi at least online this week sometime with the start of a monitoring page.

 

@Roman - I could do all of that with any controller on the market but the issue I have is, and I don't me to offend anymore, my blood isn't that rich. Yes I understand that the cost of the controllers on the market are due to testing and the components used have a guarantee to work. I'm a DIY guy. Plus some of the crazyer stuff I want to do aren't avabilbe for the Apex or Reef Keeper.

@nick - I am using NGINX with PHP5 and MySQL 5. Hardly any RAM utilized as of yet but I don't have much running on the webserver side of things. Might move the SQL side to an external host. Plan to write in python but was trying to figure out if there was a way to write php to control the pi. Still researching. Also need to figure out which temp probes to get as those are the first thing I want to get running.

 

Does anyone have an Apex controlling AI Sols and willing to share the code? Not sure if the Apex will actually give out the base code it uses to communicate with the PMW controller or not. Trying to figure out if I can control dimming with the Raspberry Pi or if I'm going to need to add an Andurino for it.