I’m a geek and I own an saltwater aquarium. it was just a matter of time before I’ll start building my own DIY aquarium controller.

the basic rule in saltwater aquarium keeping is : patience, patience, patience. so I took the same principle building the controller.

the core of the system is a Raspberry PI B+ computer with a WiFi dongle.

the first thing I Implemented is a thermostat. I used ds18b20 chip I had. a piece of plastic tube and a lot of silicone glue made it pretty much waterproof.

the second peripheral was a 8-relay board (from ebay) hacked together with a power extension cord with multiple sockets (careful, do it only if you know your way around electricity)

next came ביקקפ  Ph probe with a miniPh adapter that still needs to be calibrated.

future plans are to add a homemade salinity probe (measuring water conductivity), and a webcam so I can check my fish while away.

server software is written python (source code here)

the software features:

• view and control all peripherals via a mobile web interface
• turning lights and wave maker on and off at desired times
• turning off wave makers for 5 minutes while feeding
• daily upload of xml data to aquarium log site