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Old 11-02-2015, 03:37 AM
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Lampshade Lampshade is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Abbotsford
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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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