Time/temperature controller

Hi everyone,

please let me introduce you my current project which I developed the last few weeks.
I'm an electronics hobbyist with one rainforest terrarium in my living room. Normally, this terrarium is controlled by several time and temperature switches for light, rain, and heating.
I want to banish this tedious and inflexible circumstance and include everything in one controller (Arduino). At very first, I wanted to edit all settings with some kind of menu within the Arduino. But this was really a pain to program, so I soon switched to another solution: I set up all parameters within a GUI on my PC and transfer it directly to the Arduino. For this I use the Processing-Environment.
Everything is up and running and in an early beta phase.

Hardware:

  • Arduino Duemilanove (Diecimila should also work)
  • RTC DS1307 clock (I2C), battery buffered
  • TSIC 206 temperature sensor (1-wire)
  • Solid state relais for 230V-switching (S202S02 from Sharp)
  • DOGM-163 LCD (ISP)

It can:

  • Time controlled switching of the light
  • Temperature/time dependend switching of a heater (you can set temperature for day and night)
  • Time controlled and second-accurate switching of your "rain installation"
  • PWM-output for your fan with some hard-coded rules (e.g. fan is at full power when heater is on and one reduced power in night...) (not yet tested)
  • LCD Display with some fancy informations on it.
  • GUI for parameter settings running on PC
  • Settings are backed in eeprom. Nothing is lost after a power failure

The Arduino reads temperature from an 1-wire sensor (TSIC 206) and time from an RTC (DS1307) and switches some SSRs which I build into a stock 230V multiple socket.

Here you can find the Arduino Sketch (TerrCtrl_brd.zip) and Processing Sketch (TerrCtrl_prc.zip), Eagle files and some pictures:
http://code.google.com/p/terrctrl/downloads/list

Hope you like it and maybe its handy for some. As with all non-commercial projects: "Use" at your own risk. This beast can kill you!
Thanks to the Arduino and Processing community creating those nice tools!

Greetings
Nick

looks great! any videos? :slight_smile: