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Originally Posted by Lampshade
I built my own a few years ago. Wow, it was a programming adventure finding different ways to measure everything i wanted. The things i found most useful where mostly stuff that default controllers don't generally come with.
I really enjoyed being able to track my PH/Temp/Etc from a webpage. I used a Google pages website locked to my account, this would be harder to do now since i'm pretty sure Google scrapped their pages. I also used pachube, now Xively for all data logging. When you're board waiting at the dentist office it's amazing how much you'll look into that day 3 weeks ago when your tank got hotter.
Also, temp probes are dirt cheap, i had 4 and averaged the temps across them and checked if within limits of the others to check for bad probes. I had lots of heat shutoff's and didn't want my tank reacting to a failed temp probe.
The thing i liked the most was color indexing. I'm old school and still use Halides, you can track color shift very easily now so it's well worth looking into.
Alerts are fairly easy to set up through a twitter feed, i had any alarms sent to my twitter. Any measured value outside of range, sump overflow sensor, sump level sensor, herbie level sensor, and a few others i'm probably missing.
I also liked variable day light, most of you fancy LED people have this built in now. I calculated sunrise/sunset times on the gold coast, this gave me short days in summer(their winter) and long days in winter, which helps with heating issues.
The only issue I've ever had with this system is my power supply. Get a decent regulated power supply, especially if you're using mechanical relays. I learned this after frying my first arduino.
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Most of the Heavy draw items like the power bars will have their own supplies for the relays. The relays will be in turn triggered by a FET which is triggered by the PCA9685. going this route is great as there are 62 address combos that you can choose for your smartbar, LED driver or whatever output device your using.
Also forgot to mention that since DC pumps are hitting the market there will be a 4CH DC pump controller on the horizon as well.
The hardware to me is the easy part!
The software on the other hand... lets just say im a bit rusty LOL