Going to next level of Aquarium Automation...who's with me?

aktill · March 19, 2019, 6:09pm

Thanks! Been learning a lot.

In terms of voice alerts I just leverage our Alexas. I can call any of them directly with TTS, and so for water change fills I have a series of notifications that go out (tank filling, tank full, tank drained). I don’t have ours completely automated because I don’t trust auto dosing of Seachem Safe, so that’s a manual step. I then turn on the change pump by voice, and it lets me know when the tank is drained (we change daily from a 150 gallon holding tank).

I also have the intention of voice alerting based off some Smartthings leak sensors (duck weed causes the odd issue), but I don’t want to buy a ST hub and I haven’t quite figured out Conbee/ST playing nice yet.

I did recently figure out how to make our Fluval 3.0’s play nicely with a timer, so I can get a few ramp on/off periods over the day (that’s sort of nice).

Otherwise, just a lot of wet sleeves keeping all the babies fed and happy.

aktill · March 26, 2019, 1:25pm

Before I found home assistant I was working on an Alexa custom skill to allow me to use voice to log all the things I do around the fish room (dose ferts, change water, start and end quarantine etc). It’s a big job, but it was coming along slowly and steadily.

After finding HA, I of course wanted to start displaying those results graphically in my floor plan layouts. Ideally, I’d have visual alerts when I filter was due for cleaning etc (with 30 tanks, they aren’t getting done each week).

Think I’ve finally cracked how to read my DynamoDB in Node Red, so now it’s just a case of figuring out how I want to show things in the floor plan. Gets a little squinty, so still a work in progress.

On other fronts, I just bought a Nest temperature sensor which I can’t seem to read in HA, and my SmartThings water leak sensors are becoming a PIA. I was hoping to read them with ZHA and a Conbee stick (not supported in Deconz), but I don’t quite yet understand how to read them (work in progress).

I’ve also decided to at some point hook a spare Arduino I have up to HA in some fashion (to drive some fish room tank temp and level sensors), but that’s a whole kettle of fish in terms of communicating with my wifi HA Pi etc.

Making progress though!

cowboy · April 24, 2019, 3:25pm

Dude! I finally had some free time to try the pyseneye & Seneye component you made for us. Awesome! Now I just have to order some new slides. Thank you!

Also, back when I setup my Seneye through the API interface, I made my own icons for pH, NH3, O2, NH4, and light values. (see screenshots) Dunno if there’s a way for you to include them as part of your component but I’m happy to contribute them to the HA component. Just tell me where to send / upload them.

Well done!

mcclown · April 25, 2019, 1:22am

Glad to see someone else is getting some use out of it

Great icons! I think the best way to get them included is to contribute them back Material Design Icons, then I can change to using them once they’re accepted there. https://materialdesignicons.com/contribute

Anantasak_Tippayacha · May 29, 2019, 3:33am

I found this may interesting for finding NH4 value from dissolved NH3

refer from https://www.jmaterenvironsci.com/Document/vol8/vol8_NS/522-JMES-2876-Purwono.pdf

mcclown · June 26, 2019, 4:37am

@cowboy I’ve released a more complete version of my AquaIllumination component. Finally did a write up on it as well. Figured I’d add a link back here as well, since this is pretty much definitive aquarium thread.

Gagan_Kochar · July 6, 2019, 6:21pm

Hi,

I have been following your project for quite a long time just reading through and through trying to see how i can put it into my use as i don’t own a aquarium but i do hobby hydroponics and the hobby has gone quite a big now changing water from tanks and dosing plants is just a head ache so for nothing is problem running dosing pumps on 12v with input slider as how long it will run the relay the pump is plugged into seconds it runs so its 1ml per second setting achieved by putting a speed controller in between the pumps and controlling their pumping speed till i got to my 1ml/sec.

Please i would like your and the community help into i want to integrate pH, EC dissolved sensors and i am not a coder or anything but i follow any guide and tweak things like anything please if any one can point me this direction how can connect Ph and ec sensors to HAssio it will be a great help into next direction

thanks in advance.

cowboy · July 8, 2019, 2:01pm

Hi Gagan,

As far as doser pumps, I’ve already done a write up on how to convert 220V Stepper motors for doser pumps into HA controllable, removing the need for the older micro controller they previously were provided with. I also provided the code I threw together to provide the User Interface elements & MQTT side of the solution.

This solution should even work with DC powered motors either with the DC version of the Sonoff 4-gang switch or if you build it from the ground up, 3D printing the dosing components and supplying only ESP chips and motors, and wiring it together yourself.

Of further interest to you, I’ve adapted two 4 channel dosers this way, and One has been installed on the aquarium with great success. The second unit had nothing to do since I stopped with breeding clownfish, so now it waters the backyard flower garden for my wife. I even introduced a binary sensor to indicate when it’s raining, that it doesn’t need to water the flower garden on that day.

Unfortunately, I’ve not had any time or hard requirement to implement EC or pH Tube sensors. My salinity stays pretty solid in place, and pH is measured by the Seneye devices I have. (Bows in appreciation to @mcclown for making this possible.)

I do know that making the hardware for pH meters is esp difficult due to electrical isolation requirements needed for an accurate pH measurement. There are some links to some 3rd party solutions that are prebuilt and made for makers, which are above (I posted about a year back about this topic) which I would recommend you to look at. But perhaps someone else on the forum has made their own pH / EC solutions and has good plans for it and will chime in to help you.

Good luck and keep us posted what you end up finding to go with, so that other’s may also learn from your experiences.

Gagan_Kochar · July 9, 2019, 6:59pm

Hi,

thank you for taking the time out and replying, i have had full luck with all the automations from drain pumps (relays with level float sensor) to fill pumps(relays with level float sensor) even putting in flow sensors to calculate amount of water flowing in and out of the tanks.

Again the relays control all the important functions like lights fans heater chiller humidifier connected with corresponding automations.

the problem when i get stuck with is again pH and EC i am even ready to spend for tentacle shield and stamps by atlas scientific but then again i am no coder i need something which tells me how to connect, will go over again with your recommendations.

i have scoped now the tentacle shield and the example library is pretty easy to code on arduino and run any idea how we can get feed from sensor connected to UNO on I2C to hassio ?

Thankyou again

sfgabe · July 10, 2019, 4:46pm

Hi @Gagan_Kochar

I would urge you to check out reef-pi - there is a tutorial on how to integrate the atlas scientific pH probe. The info from Reef-Pi is then available via API, which can be easily pulled into HomeAssistant as a sensor. Even if you only use it for getting pH readings, it will be by far the easiest way to grab that data, as you won’t really have to muck about with code.

You can also look through the giant Reef2Reef thread to see how other folks are getting pH readings with it.

The Atlas probe is too pricey for my little nano setup so I’ve just integrated a Google spreadsheet where I update dropper tests. You can read more about my setup on my Reef2Reef thread, which is a mixture of Reef-Pi and HomeAssistant control.

Just for kicks, here’s what mine looks like lately:

Gagan_Kochar · July 11, 2019, 5:08pm

Thank you , for the link to reefpi going to check this out also had a email conversation with atlas scientific they say they are currently working on the code for mqtt as almost everyday they are getting requests the guy said almost 2 weeks and it will be done. so looking forward for that also,

can you also share how you used API settings from reefpi to HASS your system seems to reporting all the values needed

many thanks

sfgabe · July 11, 2019, 8:52pm

Good to know about the MQTT! A much needed option.

The sensors and controls that go to Reef-pi are just Rest Sensors. For different sensors, it’s just the “resource” link that changes.

The sensor.yaml entry for getting the water temp look like this:

- platform: rest
  name: ReefControlPiTemp
  username: !secret reefcontrolpi_username
  password: !secret reefcontrolpi_password
  authentication: basic
  resource: http://reefcontrolpi.local/api/tcs/1/usage
  headers:
      Connection: keep-alive
      content-type: application/json
      Referer: http://reefcontrolpi.local/
      Cookie: !secret reefcontrolpi_cookie
  value_template: '{{ value_json.current[-1].temperature | round(2) }}'
  unit_of_measurement: '°F'

My entire (giant) HomeAssistant config is on github here if you want to see more.

Gagan_Kochar · July 15, 2019, 7:33pm

@sfgabe thank you for pointing me to your github page, I think i will now be able to get to where i want will keep posted how my project goes

thanks again

segalion · August 22, 2019, 10:43am

I have released a Swimmig Pool Automation System based on raspberry pi + HA, that have some similarities with this project. Maybe people here can get or propose ideas.
I use Atlas Scientific EZO boards and I have a custom-component to support all of them (pH, ORP, Dissolved Oxigen and Conductivity…). Only pH and ORP has been tested, and only UART connection is supported (no I2C).

Thanks

Thnaks

Dinoaus · August 28, 2019, 9:54pm

Hi sfgabe, how are you storing the cookie details in your secrets file? I tried and it complains about tabs in the cookie.

sfgabe · August 29, 2019, 5:07am

As far as I can see there shouldn’t be any tabs in the cookie, you might want to check for a copy/paste error. Here’s what I have in secrets.yaml:

reefcontrolpi_cookie: "auth=BIGSTRINGOFNUMBERSANDLETTERS="

Dinoaus · August 29, 2019, 5:27am

Thanks for that. I didn’t have the auth= in front of the cookie. It’s now working.

cowboy · August 29, 2019, 12:44pm

@sfgabe thanks for posting your entire HA config online. I still need to clean up mine & get mine posted likewise, and is on the list of things to do.

One thing I learned from your setup was the whole Janet speech engine. Ref URL for those who, like me, also missed that memo about Janet:

I am currently using Google TTS via all my remote Pi boxes via the speaker output. The core HA instance sends texts to say out to the Pi boxes via MQTT, and TTS conversion happens on each Pi. I’ve also been very surprised and pleased how “in sync” all the speakers sound across the house, despite different system loads on each Pi.

How is Janet working out for you? By any chance do you have some videos or audio recordings of how it sounds? Any implementation tips to watch out for? I think I may give this a try myself.

And again, thanks!

sfgabe · August 31, 2019, 2:08am

@cowboy ha just in time for the final season! It would be especially cute to get her to give aquarium updates with fish facts, etc.

Janet (the Project you linked to) was great, though I think the latest google TTS changes on version (97.2) messed something up on my system, so she’s been troublingly quiet since I upgraded. I’m planning to look into this week, if I get anywhere I’ll post on the Janet page.

The code itself, with all the randomized response macros have been useful for other parts of templating, so it’s a good reference doc anyway.

Voices are from the Google Translate source, so you can pick any of these: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices - IMO “en-US-Wavenet-F” sounds the most Janet-like. You used to define the voice in the config.yaml file, but I’m not sure if that’s correct anymore.

pondguru · September 12, 2019, 9:15am

Hi All,

I have been trying to get pyseneye running on my pi on jesse but keep getting errors stating that libraries not available and the error below. Tried both python and python3 with and without sudo and same errors and pulling my hair out here. I have a device connected so it should just work.
All advice welcomed…

Alan