Years ago I purchased a decent size aquarium, around 36 gallons if I recall. Shortly after I started to travel more for work since I worked remotely and meetups pre-covid were more common.
I remember around that same time as my trips got a bit longer than I was thinking I needed a way to automate feeding and monitoring the aquarium so that I wouldn’t end up coming home from a work trip to an aquarium full of dead fish.
It all started with an automatic fish feeder, which while I did as advertised was just well, boring to say the least. I took it upon myself to open up the fish feeder, hook it to a relay via the GPIO port on a Raspberry Pi and automate the whole process. I constructed a simple webpage that I could access that had nothing more than an image taken from the Pi camera, the temperature which was monitored by a waterproof water sensor also hooked to the Pi, and then a button to feed the fish.
As time went on, and many moves happened I got rid of the tank and boxed up all the parts … that is until now when I start this project all over again. Not to say that my skillset now dwarves what I had then, but in many ways it has and I think I will be able to breathe some new life into this project and get it going again, and perhaps better than before.
This is the start of the Automated Aquarium 2.0, and it starts this week with me digging or trying to dig out all of the parts from storage and get this thing back in action. Pulling from memory this was more or less the previous setup
- Raspberry Pi 3 B+
- EHEIM Everyday Fish Feeder Programmable Automatic Food Dispenser
- Project Box
- Temp sensor
Of course, this is the worst possible recollection of parts, so it’s likely going to involve some reorders and searching for the right model numbers to get this all working again.