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

Ciwyn I think that could be something to look into, but I don’t know off hand. I remember something about master/slave arrangement with SPI? Don’t know enough about SPI yet to be able to really tell you. (looks at @jnvd3b)

So yesterday evening, I sat around and killed a few too many hours trying to get just the right font look to create some nicely fitting icons for the Seneye values to be monitored. Looks a little more polished now, I think. :slight_smile:

Today, I focused on the pre-requisites to having a look at the LDE feature of Seneye 2.0 and the SUDdriver python development. But as expected a little, the process of upgrading 3 Seneye devices probably elevated my blood pressure a tad bit, and took over 4 hours after various updates & installer failures all had to be resolved. :confused:

I’ll save most of my gripes about the Seneye, but have to mention this one because it’s a tiny new problem I think maybe Home Assistant actually solves? In the past, Seneye used to only cease with the pushed Alert/Notification services after the 30 days expiration mark passed. Otherwise, you could still see what your pH and Free Ammonia values were just as easily as before. And the data was still recorded in the cloud and available on the initial dashboard when one logged into Seneye’s portal.

And I bought into this ecosystem under that understanding. They wouldn’t take responsibility for alerting me outside of the calibration range, but I could continue to use the slides out of the 30 day period without restriction and at my own risk. If it all went sideways, only I was to blame.

Case in point - I consider the use of Seneye monitor’s absolutely mandatory for Quarantine and Fish Fry and Baby tanks. However, in the case of my large multi-tank system, the use of a Seneye is more on the ‘luxury’ side of things. In almost 13 years, pH has hardly ever gone outside of 8.2-8.4. I have a calibrated pinpoint meter I ended up getting anyways with my Seneye to double check an erratic / malfunctioning slide or three. The last time I needed to run a Seneye Slide on my big tank was at the end of Summer when I setup a new standalone 200liter clownfish grow-out tank with the plan to merge it into the big system shortly later. And merging one of the Fry tanks too. Afterwards, I thought here’s an opportunity - as all systems became merged - I left the Seneyes in place to watch / observe the deviation that would occur in 3 slides in the same body of water (never wanted to just waste 3 slides on this experiment before). What’s been interesting is that at least 2 of the Seneye’s are showing generally the same deviation patterns just at increasingly further points respective of each other as times goes along. In contrast, to the Seneye with the highest pH value, that seems to just have gone full tilt and flat-lined.
(My pinpoint pH say’s I’m at 8.45. and I just threw in a new Seneye slide to soak last night. Just wanted to disclaim that I am not using 3 month expired slides to actually monitor my pH levels. lol. :wink:

0149
54

I find it interesting, because it does confirm that generally speaking, one should replace and only use a calibrated slide. However, it also is refreshing to see, because it also re-affirms something I wasn’t too sure of in the beginning - how long does one have after the 30-day period until things go sideways. Useful to know incase you ever get caught out without slides for a week while waiting for the new order to come in - the slides do degrade after 30 days, but not “unexpectedly” and can be carried over beyond the 30 day period for a short while without concern.

But in Version 2.0 - it appears that those values on the Windows SCA application dashboard are simply blocked out with an icon that says Slide Expired! and doesn’t allow you to see those values. And going to the user-portal to see the data, at least on the Dashboard - the NH3 and Ph values are notably absent. Temp is there, water level is there, but NH3 and Ph aren’t. But if you drill down to the individual Seneye Sensor USB Device pages, and look in the data activity, it’s still recording data (contrary to information posted about SCA2.0 on their web page.)

And… fortunately, the data is still completely coming across the api.seneye.com website where my script I wrote the other day pulls the data from. Which, completely allows me to solve the “hidden values” from the Seneye Dashboard. I knew HA would already solve a few quirks about Seneye I didn’t like, didn’t expect them to throw a new one along the way. lol

I hate when I get the feeling a company is punishing it’s user/customer base.

Strange Seneye, Strange. Hooray HA!

PS - I laughed out loud the next morning when I re-read my initial post and saw that I had diligently redacted 3 month old expired Seneye serial numbers from my screenshot. You all may laugh now at my expense too. I am. :joy::joy:

Good stuff. You can set up slide expiration reminders in Ha now. :wink:

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That… my own customized pH and Ammonia Alarms - think wake me up in the bedroom upstairs while an Ammonia bloom in a fry tank holding hundreds of babies at 3am. Or just change the color of an LED lamp in the living room when an Alarm conditions is raised. We’re gonna make Seneye do a few things it’s never done before.

So if the api is working so well, is the SUD driver approach even needed? Is the LDE needed? I am toying with the idea of just wiring it to my htpc and being done with it.

The API works well, considering that it’s providing me info the Windows App and Portal don’t, it works better than those two. lol
But, with the API approach, you still have to run SCA on Windows or SWS. I’d really like to get of an aging Windows laptop that’s running only for my Seneye and nothing else, but I don’t want to buy their overprice version of a proprietary RaspberryPi (SWS).

When I saw the SUD driver required the upgrade to 2.0, before I upgrade past 1.3, let’s first try the API and see if data formats or anything changes between that and 2.0 on the API site. (that way I could at least deliver some version 1.3 compatibility if it did change, and as the road to version 2.0 is a one way ticket…)

I also thought, ‘who knows how long it’ll take to solve the SUD issues’, but getting API working first would let myself and others at least then start getting busy with automations and other ideas. I’m hoping ultimately, any information we get from API is at least the same (in principle) as the SUD solution, so anything made for the API in HA will just work with SUD once (and if) that support is achieved.

I thought LDE might be interesting in case someone (or myself) decides to get at the data, without having the Cloud in the Middle. And removing the hard link requirement to Internet / Cloud in order to function, is right in line with Home Assistant principles, isn’t it? :wink:

But already as it stands now, this is a big improvement with API, the way I see it. I can finally have HA tell when the Seneye SCA (or Windows itself) has just gone into Suspended Animation mode, and HA will finally be able to just kick that whole laptop into a reboot without me intervening. After 7 years with that & Seneye…ooooohhhh…happy days! LOL

But if you want to go SCA and API using the above approach, please be my guest. That’s why I shared it! :smiley:
Let me know if I can help you with anything, or if you need some help setting up the UI side of things.

Just noticed that I forgot to post the URL’s @jnvd3b found and sent me. :slight_smile:




Just a small update: I got detoured looking at Hass.IO and digging into the details of resinOS to decide if I want to upgrade to that or not…

So I finally decided against the Hass.IO path forward. The offering of resinOS as the base appeared at first glance to offer some really nice promise for future deployment options, particularly since my solution is based around a multi-node model. However, the discovery that the Hass.IO team saw fit to remove the traditional docker utils / commands as well as some expected resinOS functionality appeared to be a stumbling block, if not all downright blocking issue. After spending 24+ hours on reading up and becoming familiar with how to work within the resinOS environment, it was very frustrating to discover I couldn’t utilize a lot of the potential power it seems to contain.

So I decided to revisit Hass.IO another time later and install Hassbian for now. Perhaps there’s an alternative way of doing what I need and just need more time to figure out what it is, but will deal with that later.

Needless to say, after installing a fresh copy of HA 58.1 (hassbian) and porting my configuration over, I was both pleased to see some of the new functionality but horrified to find out how slugish HA has become since version 44.

Particularly watching my automations run and the huge lag that occurs between a pump coming on and an update to the status of that pump being reflected internally (input_boolean or just the switch state even.

Further, under version 44, the CPU load used to average around 0.40-0.60. Now it’s around 2.40. No errors are coming up in the HomeAssistant.Log so I need some time to hunt elsewhere, perhaps in something with the OS that’s included with Hassbian?

Oh yeah, it seems unable to display correctly on the iOS client now on my old iPad2. This is also very disappointing now too. :frowning:

Need time to investigate further…sigh

I’ve liked Hass.io but that’s actually my only experience with HA. Only been up and running since august.

So I’m trying to get my little temp probe project running with a pi zero W and have run into a stumbling block right out of the gate. I’m trying to set everything up headlessly because I don’t have the USB and HDMI adapters. I’m using this tutorial to do this: [https://www.losant.com/blog/getting-started-with-the-raspberry-pi-zero-w-without-a-monitor] which is pretty standard. Whenever I turn the pi on I don’t see an IP address for it anywhere on my network which makes it quite tough for me to ssh into it as I’m using putty and you prettymuch need the IP. The SSID and PW are correct so I don’t know what I’m missing…

Do your SSID and/or password have any spaces in it? Make sure both are surrounded in the “” quotes. If you’ve got a really long / complicated passphrase, try setting it to something simple and stupid quickly / briefly on both the AP and the hass.io config & try to connect with that. I’ve stumbled over some char’s not getting /escaped out properly in my setups in the past.

It might be coming up as a hotspot, try using your phone to scan for it and then connect with that, then see if you can figure out why it’s not working properly.

I did not see it at all as a hotspot. The SSID and PW are definitely correct and they are not that complicated, no spaces between quotation marks. I just did a fresh install of raspian stretch on the SD card and still no luck. The LED lights up every time I plug it in.

I had the same problem getting wifi on the RP3 I run hass.io on. I couldn’t get wifi to work so I just plugged it into ethernet. I don’t have that option with the pi zero.

I also have no success ssh into the pi with putty using [email protected]. When I do that it opens a window but I can’t type anything. Hass.io really is my first experience with a pi so I tend to screw a lot of this up.

This might help… assuming you have already set up the wpa_supplicant.conf with the wifi creds…

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
add
####################
#; start of wireless bits
#; this command stays for all configs
allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0
###################
#; comments indicated by #;
#; commands indicated by #
#; remove the # to enable the command
####################
#; if using static IP then....#
#iface wlan0 inet static
# address UR_IP
#gateway UR_ROUTER_IP
#netmask 255.255.255.0
##################
#; otherwise use dhcp #
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
###################
#; OPEN wireless config #
#wireless-essid UR_ESSID
#wireless-mode managed

###################
#; WEP wireless config #
wireless-essid "your wifi ssid"
wireless-key "your wifi password"
#; end of WEP config

########################
#; WPA and WPA2 wireless config #
#; all command config lines above HERE to be #'ed except the entry auto wlan0
########################
#wpa-driver wext
#wpa-ssid UR_ESSID
#; wpa-ap-scan is 1 for visible and 2 for hidden hubs

sudo systemctl restart wpa_supplicant
sudo ifdown wlan0
sudo ifup wlan0
#restart the network software
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
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I have set up wpa_supplicant.conf. However, I have no idea how to do any of that.

Hmmm I suppose that might be difficult if you can’t get in as no network cable :stuck_out_tongue:

Did you put a ssh file of zero length in the boot partition?

You just need to create a file in there called ssh no extension just ssh

Yes I have done that. Btw, I have noticed that file disappears when I reinsert the SD into my computer to view the files (like making sure my network info is correct) is that normal?

I dunno, I never looked to see what happened to it :slight_smile:

And your .conf file looks like this…

image

If those don’t work I would return it for another.

A Linux compatible USB->Ethernet adapter is about $5, that’s how I set up my Pi Zeros :slight_smile:

May be worth it. I may actually have the HDMI adapter somewhere which means I could just configure it via GUI. However, I didn’t think setting it up headless would be this difficult…

Cowboy I swear we’ll get this thread back on track soon!