dentex / piac

(Raspberry) Pi Acquarium Controller

PiAC v1.4

###(Raspberry) Pi Aquarium Controller

##Info This is a DIY project to control and monitor some aspects of my fresh-water aquarium.

It uses a Raspberry Pi and some hardware to control/monitor some mains sockets, a blue LED strip, a custom-built LED fixture (actually four spotlights) two cooling fans and two temperature probes. Some schematics are available in the hardware_info folder, although I didn't include some mains wiring; anyway it's simple: it's just the four sockets closed by four relays and the wiring towards two buck-converters to have 12V and 5V from the 24V power supply now in use for the main LEDs).

On the software side, this project uses/depends on:

• https://github.com/richardghirst/PiBits/tree/master/ServoBlaster (hybrid hardware/software PWM)
• https://projects.drogon.net/raspberry-pi/wiringpi/ (userspace GPIO pins control)
• https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader (auto-upload backups to DropBox)
• https://ngrok.com/ (remote ssh and web access)
• https://dweet.io and https://freeboard.io (IoT: messages from this project to a web dasboard)
• https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ (a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor)

Basically, then I wrote a collection of simple bash scripts running with cron on a Raspbian distribution.

Please note: this repository may not work out-of-the-box to start a similar project. Some other bits are necessary, since PiAC also depends on some Debian packages manually installed and their configurations. I will be glad to explain further to anyone interested and anyway I'm expanding the repository with some configuration files (i.e. from the /etc folder).

##Features ####v1.0

• three GPIO pins (17, 27, 22) connected to an ULN2003A and a 12V rail to have three "PWM to voltage" channels, to use with:

1. a blue night LED strip
2. unused
3. unused

• four GPIO pins (18, 23, 24, 25) to switch 4 single relay boards via four opto-isolators "modules", to use with:

1. lid cooling fan (+ LED spotlights cooling fans, from v1.3)
2. CO2 electrovalve
3. secondary (micro-)acquarium LED light
4. unused

• GPIO pin n.4 (1-wire) to two DS18B20 temp probe connectors (water and RPi case);

####v1.1

• Switched from a Raspberry Pi model B rev1 to a model B+;
• Finished mounting the lid cooler fan;
• Real Time Clock added;
• rootfs mounted on USB stick.

####v1.2

• Manage a DIY LED fixture with sunrise/sunset simulation.

####v1.3

• Use two DC-DC converters to have 12V (for blue LEDs and fans) and 5V (for the RPi itself) from the 24V main power supply in use for the LED fixtures;
• LED spotlights cooling fans.

####v1.4

• Fetch sunrise/sunset data from http://sunrise-sunset.org and build a new timetable every day (based on actual location).

####TO-DO

• Power button on the main enclosure, to reboot/shutdown the RPi.