I’ve used an esp8266 to help with monitoring of a terrarium for my pet spiders. Check out my project write-up on github. Suggestions welcome!
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I saw pet spiders and thought, oh, man i bet he drives a creepy white panel van too lol. I saw its for your kid and i can definitely relate with you now. We got a guinea pig cause this Dad cant say no to my girl…ugh! Any chance spiders eat guinea pigs??
A couple things to consider.
Setting up notifications if temp high/low + few degrees offset. Its not real common but, ive had those Songle relays get stuck and wont fully open/close. Heat mats dont seem to be very long lived either. If temp passes an upper or lower threshold, you probably want to be aware of that sooner than later.
Is humidity not important to their environment?
I couldnt tell on yours but, some of those esp based pcb’s come with an NPN mosfet connected to a gpio specifically for situations like yours. It looks like it has a large SMD mosfet on there. It may be for something else but, probably worth investigating if you dont know its purpose.
If you do need one, i love these single and 4 channel mosfet modules and you can use them for a bunfch of things.
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Hey! Thanks for taking the time to reply. We also have two dogs so that rules out any sort of rodent I’m afraid! And I struggle sometimes to get this spider to eat flies so guinea pigs are definitely out of the question!
I do have notifications set up through home assistant for high/low temperatures. Also to alert me if the device itself goes offline. I still need to work out how to detect of the SHT becomes disconnected though for whatever reason. The SHT also does a good job of monitoring humidity too, which also gets monitored from Home Assistant. I have this setup on a Dashboard on a tablet right underneath my monitor so it gets looked at often in the day (the little spider lights up red when the heat mat is on):
For MOSFET, I actually brought some single channel PCBs from Amazon but haven’t gotten around to properly setting them up yet.
MOSFET
Oh nice! Those mosfets will work, but i don’t particularly like that style personally. They’re awkward to work woth and bulky and the body of a mosfet is connected to ground so theres potential problems there if anything comes into contact with it. Although they will technically work, those are really more for workbench testing which is why it has header pins for breadboard wires which are horribly unsecure and not really for a finishes/long term installation. With the other style you can use wire ferrules and actually do it properly.
That setup looks super neat. Thank you for the pointers!