reef-pi – An opensource reef tank controller based on Raspberry Pi. Ranjib was on the weekly Adafruit Show and Tell (video 25 min, 35s mark’) and sent us this nice overview –
This is Ranjib, author of reef-pi project. This is a follow-up email, with some details about the project. But before I jot down the details, I just want to express my gratitude to Lady Ada, You and the rest of the adafruit crew. My adafruit order history represents my learning of electronics :-). Being in Adafruit’s show n tell, was a long due homage.
reef-pi is a 2.5-year-old project aimed at providing a modular, affordable and opensource (open hardware) reef tank controller. reef-pi uses Raspberry Pi and few ancillary adafruit components (ds18b20 sensor, pca9685 breakout board, uln2803 mounted perma protoboards etc) to iteratively build a full-fledged controller capable of:
- Equipment control: on-demand and timer based control of AC 110V equipment (pump, skimmer etc).
- Dusk to dawn light cycle simulation: Using pwm (pca9685)
- Temperature control (ds18b20 for sensing) to keep temperature at 78F.
- Water level control (using photo electric water level sensor) to keep salinity at 1.025 (specific gravity)
- pH monitoring (using atlas scientific ezo circuit & probe)
- Camera : Periodic photo shoots using pi camera and streaming video using motion software. Useful when we are on vacation and keep a tab on our tank
- Doser: Dosing trace elements, Calcium and ph buffers using peristaltic pumps (powereed by l293d+pwm)
- Email and text message alert when things go south. A comprehensive in-software dashboard as well as data emission to adafruit.io for external monitoring.
reef-pi is written in go (backend) and react (frontend), runs entirely on Pi (including zero), relatively efficient (a nano tank, which are under 30G can be run on 30% cpu & memory footprint), has comprehensive tutorials (build guides), a small community of builders (there are around 40+ documented reef-pi builds in reef tank related forums across US, UK, Australia and South Africa). I presented reef-pi last year’s maker faire (here in bay are), and received the blue ribbon (I’ll be presenting it again, this weekend during 2018 Bay Area Maker faire). reef-pi the project itself has an ongoing thread is reef2reef (the largest reef tank forum) and now its the highest viewed thread in the DIY section, that thread is the primary point of support and the most up to date place to get information about reef-pi, while the website reflects the well-tested guides against major release.
Learn more:
https://reef-pi.github.io/
reef2reef thread (for builders and all general queries)
Slack channel (for developers mostly): reef-pi.slack.com
Flickr photostream
It’s all free and opensource (contents are all under CC , software are all under apache 2). Learn guide coming soon maybe!