I think it should be possible but I’ve not succeeded in trying it. I had a look at hass.io after I was comfortable with hassbian, and while it looks to hold promise, there were too many things I was not liking for myself and stuck it out with hassbian, which I found more easily to customize. Feel free to try to make it work on hass.io and keep us updated, if you do. If you find success maybe you can help me make the switch. 
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This is a bit off topic from HA but oh well…
Here’s a couple of photos @jnvd3b. The first one was in during a Dec Harvest - you can see how dense it has grown with the sun behind the bottle unable to penetrate the plankton very well.
I started this experiment in parallel to my normal LED illuminated phyto farm indoors (in case the roof project went south) back around this time last year. I went through the whole winter up until end of Jan when temps went below -2C (freezing temp of my salinity mixtures) - and with the forecast at the time expected to hold those temps for more than a week, I finally brought it indoors - and sat it inside an attic window. Actually, the attic has a lot of windows had is one of the most illuminated rooms of the house, so it did just fine for the next 2 months indoors until I was sure it wouldn’t drop below -2C anymore. It’s back on the roof now with the full compliment of 8 X 1.5 liter bottles brewing 12 liters of phyto at any given time now. But I left it out there up to the exact moment it passed the Temp line & used HA to monitor conditions & trigger an alarm once it passed that limit. And using weather input data, I could easily set parameters to raise other alerts if Weather Forecast predicted plummeting temps past the freezing temp of ocean water. For those of us in very high northern/southern latitudes and more extreme cold weather, HA is a life saver for such operational and environmental monitoring. I even had a security camera feed on my Aqua Controller tab page in HA to visually check on it.
So even when it snowed, as long as it didn’t dip below my parameters set into HA, I just left the phyto out there & it kept growing even under just 7.5 hours of sunlight on the day of the winter’s solstice.
Not only did I realize an electrical costs savings by eliminating my LED farming activites (about 50 watts of power on for 16 hours a day for the LEDs alone… I’m down to 12 watts for the whole farm now) - I actually get better looking colors and densities from my crops from the sunlit phytoplankton, without near the “clumping” of phytoplankton mass associated with artificial. To remedy this, artificial light farmers have to “shake / spin their bottles” every few days and so did I. But the rooftop farm doesn’t seem to need it at all, so I don’t shake those bottles at all.
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Awesome and not offtopic at all. You are using HA to solve yet another problem.
At first I thought you were regulating parameters but even monitoring with HA is useful.
It’s very hot currently where I live so I would be afraid to do this without some type of way to cool it but i guess from fall-spring this would work for me as well.
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If you’ve got a room that’s air-cooled and is brightly lit most of the day, that’s actually enough to grow it. The primary reason I had to move back from attic to roof is too much noise for my wife in the bedroom.
@cowboy Is that Phyto all to supplement feeding your tanks?
Smart move putting it outside I have tried in the past with LED’s but I was not successful, I don’t think I gave it enough attention! Also space to put a rig like that is hard to find… We also have to leave space to LIVE in our homes
@cliffdude, no, not directly at least. I have also about 10-20 liters of rotifers and amphipods and copepods brewing downstairs at any given time. The Phyto is primarily for that, and the pods are primarily for breeding clownfish & raising the baby fry. Second to that, when I’m not raising baby fry, I do dose the extra phyto / pods to my tank.
FWIW, using a tool box as the phyto-farm ‘carriage’ is actually the smallest footprint my phyto-farm has taken to date. Using artificial light I used to spread the bottles to ensure full illumination / efficiency per watt & then the “lightbox” that contained it all (and also help prevent cross-contamination with my rotifer cultures) sucked a bunch of shelf space. But outdoor sunlight? I can nearly forget about worrying over that now.
In fact, this has withstood several tests at winds up to Force 9-10 with just 4 bottles in it, and it was fine. Had a security camera on it the whole time and it never appeared it wanted to tip over. Bottles shook a bit, but that was it.
BTW, space was another big reason to move this outside for us as well. Dutch homes are small compared to German homes, and tiny compared to American homes. We are lucky in that in addition to the normal traditional red-tiled slanted roof, we have a few flat sections which any of make worthy candidates for my project. And my “dedicated fish room” isn’t like what you might expect to find in an American Dedicated Fishroom… rather, it’s more the Dutch meaning: 1/4 of the room is dedicated to the fishroom. 1/4 is dedicated to house heating infra & a utility sink (for mops, etc). 1/4 is dedicated to storing up to 4 bicycles (two of which hang from the low ceiling to make space) and the last 1/4th is dedicated to storage of construction supplies, domestic supplies and salt-storage for the aquariums. It was already very tight back there and running my phyto farm in that room for 4 years trying to keep it from getting cross contaminated with other cultures (it happened a few times) was a PITA.
@jnvd3b: My phyto has hit peaks of above 40C in the peak of summer and in directly sunlight and been just fine.
So I think you could do this in someplace like Texas or Arizonia or the Oz Outback with a few considerations to keep in mind:
1.) You don’t need to put it in direct sunlight. If you built something to keep it out of direct sunlight but would get ample indirect sunlight, my experience is that is enough to grow well.
2.) Locate your airpumps inside your house, where they can take cooler air in
3.) After airpumps but before the pumped air gets to the bottles, install a water-based particulate filter based on R/O water. This can be built with a soda bottle and two holes drilled through the plastic lid and airhose tubes run through. On the otherside of the lid, one airhose stops at the top of the lid (this will allow air to flow to your culture bottles), the other continues down to the bottom bottle (air input line from the pumps). The air will be forced through the water, acting as a particulate filter. But it will also evaporate over time and replace the evaporation in your phyto bottles, helping keep the salinity stable. Pumping air from inside & the evaporation effect can help cool your cultures a couple of degrees.
4.) Although water evaporates from the culture bottles, the idea with the lids on the phyto cultures is to keep rain-water out & keep most (but not all) evaporation in. Inversely, in regards for the toolbox that acts as the carriage for all the bottles - I decided it was best not to drill it for rain-water to pass through. When filled with rain water, it adds further stability to the carriage in high winds, but in summer on breeze-less days - that water evaporates freely & provides a cooling effect to the culture bottles, that can’t so freely evaporate and loose heat that way. I’ve also had the idea (but not the need…yet) to consider using that as a basis for a closed loop circulatory cooling system from a rainwater collection barrel driven by a small 4-6 watt pump.
@xbmcnut I also just ordered one of the cheap pH sensors from China with the same plan - did you ever get this working?
Some beautiful tanks in here and lots of great info. I am automating a hydroponic garden so my pH is not so life or death like you reef guys… I just need it to be in a rough range. Not sure the expensive precision meters mentioned here are necessary for me
Also wondering if anyone has devised cheap/DIY sensors for determining water level of reservoirs, or detecting leaks?
Sorry, have parked this for the time being as now that I’ve become familiar with my pool, I realise there’s a lot more to pool chemistry than just pH. Will look again in (my) summer.
@oakbrad Look into Ultrasonic distance sensors to measure water level. That is what most commercial applications use. Locate the sensor on the lid and measure the distance to the water so that way you know how far the water is from the top. You can find loads of circuit examples to hook them up to an Arduino or RPi and maybe with MySensors project add it to HA.
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So much awesome in this thread, exactly what I want to setup my new aquarium (1700l peninsula reef tank) and I really didnt know where to start. Got 2 raspberry pi’s this week, looking into connecting to my seneye and found your thread. A bit of a head explosion trying to catch up with all your developments. Im sure many many people want to replicate what you have done. Have you made a map or setup guide at any stage with all the components your using and tips. If I was going to do what you have done its hard to pick out exactly what you have running sifting through the thread?
Either way, excellent work, real inspiration and cant wait to get mine started.
Beware that most of those plant / soil moisture sensors will corrode even in normal soil conditions over time, and leech copper and other dangerous materials into liquids. For some aquariums, this could be disastrous, possibly deadly.
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That’s a very useful bit of info… thanks [quickly removes sensor]
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Hi @Stephen_Burford and welcome.
Some quick answers:
I’m actually quite close to producing a “Getting Started guide” of sorts finally as it appears, for the moment I’ll have a break inbetween assignments finally coming up shortly.
For myself, I started with the most simplest things but which would give me the greatest benefit first and worked up from there. Just starting with 1-wire Temp probes and GPIO float sensors was very easy and quite empowering, so I’d suggest starting with that.
If you’ve never wired up a GPIO float sensor - they work - and are wired - just like a GPIO Button. Search “raspberry pi gpio button” and you’ll find text or Video instructions of your choice and lots of pictures. Some recommend just using the built in resistors, others suggest putting resistors on both sides of the circuit for safety - I did the later. The cost is worth the safety of blown hardware to me.
Instructions for 1-Wire Temp probes are also all YouTube and the Internet. Familiarizing yourself with how 1-Wire would be a very good idea, if you can. You don’t need to dive into the protocol, just understand how to wire up the 3 wires & why. Yeah, and they call it 1-Wire, I know…but that refers to the single wire used for digital communications, which works best when VCC power lead and GND wire are also connected.
Regarding your Seneye… do you have a Seneye device alone, or did you buy their SeneyeWebServer bridge/router solution or hook it up to a Windows computer? I’m still sucking my Seneye data from their API server but have the spare Seneye to start testing / implementing some python code (linked too above many months back) on a RaspberryPi in hopes I can ditch my Windows laptop finally, very soon now.
Oh yes, I also started with Hassbian and am still on Hassbian. I looked at / attempted a Hass.IO (which is based on reinOS) migration awhile back, but I wasn’t comfortable enough with resinOS to find certain workarounds for functions that appeared to be prevented in resinOS.
Until then, perhaps I can help answer other questions you have?
Thank you I do have a simple HC SR04 laying around, looks like this is exactly what I need to do:
@cowboy those cheap moisture sensors are indeed terrible but the MiFlora is much better made. Those YL-69s start corroding basically immediately but I’ve had MiFloras in some of my plants for over a year and haven’t had any issues.
The problem with the MiFlora is they are Bluetooth and not terribly reliable. I have switched to using OpenMQTTGateway with a Bluetooth adapter to read the MiFlora values which works a LOT better than the Home Assistant integration. I have two of these, one near my hydroponic garden and one at the other end of my house so i am able to cover a wider area than a Pi alone.
Also easy to add other sensors to it, great project you guys may want to check out. I just use cheap Wemos D1 Minis.
To get around the reliability factor for my use, I have multiple MiFlora sensors in each area of the garden and then I use the HA statistics sensor to calculate the mean. Statistics sensor can also expire old values so if a MiFlora drops out for a while or battery dies, no problem.
Thanks for the quick reply, I have a seneye, and had a web server until a recent water change 
so I hesitated in replacing it and as im interested in rpi to run my future tank im now looking into using it as a webserver for the seneye.
look forward to your getting started guide, and i will follow the instructions and setup the above float sensor and temp probes as my next step.
Thanks again
Aw crap… Electrics + Salt Water accidents are no fun. I’ll simply offer, I know from experience how that hurts. 
Having just the Seneye data feed pulled into HA is already a WIN, in my experience. Much like my Kalkwasser dosing alarm trigger - which sends me a notification if the AutoTop-Up Kalkwasser pump runs for more than an hour, I can create notification alarms based on Seneye data - like a pH “Flatline” alarm… if the pH goes to flat line for more than 12 hours and doesn’t fluctuate, I get an alarm to check that the Seneye Windows App isn’t borked, again. I could even further automate the reboot of Windows, but that’s where I draw the line and choose to save that time/energy for Pure Pi integration of the Seneye.
One of the things I want to do with the Guide is use that opportunity to do a full blown hardware-rebuild of one of my Pi’s - the old original Pi I started this with is going to get an upgrade to a Pi3B+, and rather than being the “Frankenstein” prototype build, it’ll be a bit better polished build in the final ending. At least that’s my hope / idea / goal at this time.
Good luck with your initial build and keep us posted how it goes!!
BTW, this is exactly how I wired my GPIO “buttons / float sensors” …
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Just bookmarking this bit of info here for later reference:
If you are using the Home Assistant One Wire component instead of your own external Scripts to poll Temp data and are not happy with the 0.1 degree rounding Home Assistant performs, you can change that here (on Hassbian):
/srv/homeassistant/lib/python3.6/site-packages/homeassistant/components/sensor/onewire.py
And keyword search “round”. There should be two appearances of this in the file. An example looks like this:
value = round(float(value_read[0]), 1)
For those that don’t know python, that number “1” above defines how many places to round to. Just change this to a 2 or 3 and you’ll get either 0.00 or 0.000 rounding.
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