Automated Reef Controller
Making a saltwater tank easier to maintain
Coming from the semiconductor equipment industry, I have a good understanding of automated chemical control systems and wanted to design and build my own for my fish tank. Starting from scratch, I used sensor and motor control Arduino libraries with my own code to automatically dose chemicals and control the water temperature based off pH measurement, ultrasonic liquid level sensor, and thermocouple inputs. I also created a semi-automated calibration macro for ensuring accurate liquid dosing from the peristaltic pumps. I soldered custom breakout boards for mapping the sensor pins to the Arduino Mega microcontroller.
Packaging it all up was a custom GUI I designed for the Nextion touchscreen display.
Starting out small getting the sensors to correctly read on the serial monitor.
I designed 3D-printed DB connector mounting flanges I could easily integrate into the project box.
I only populated two of the dosing pumps, but the system supported four, including a power bus in the pump enclosure.
The dosing display. You could select different pumps and dosing amounts to be either automatically dosed per sensor logic or manually commanded with a tap.
Populating the project box with the microcontroller, various voltage converters, and breakout boards.
The fully populated project box with the main GUI display.