Aquarium Controller with Arduino

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

Hello all,

I am asking for some, well a lot, of help on a new Arduino endeavor of mine. I will preface this by saying that I have never even touched an Arduino board before or typed a line of code, so any help is greatly appreciated. Anyways I am looking to make an Arduino aquarium controller or monitor really. But let me go back and explain the whole thought process of this build before I get into the specifics.

You see, I am a high school student and I want an aquarium controller. Some other controllers are 100-200 dollars and are just not what I need. Well the other day I stumbled across someone doing something very similar with Rasberry Pi (sorry I’m new here, should I not have said that). They used it to control their lights, water auto top off, stuff like that. I thought, why can't i do the same with Arduino. Its relatively cheap and it would give me something to do over the summer. But wait, I have an Auto Top Off system already, my lighting is programable and so is my wave maker. That basically left me with temp and PH. Well I did some research to find out how much it would cost to whip up just a temp "controller" although is would be more like a glorified thermometer because I wouldn't have it turn on a fan or turn the heater off. So I am left with a pretty neat $40 digital thermometer and for those of you who don't know, a decent digital thermometer costs about $8 on Amazon.

However, (sorry I know this is a lot of information) I talked to my friend who is into programming the other day, and he said that he would be up for the challenge which reopened the door for me. I figured if I could use this Arduino thing to Monitor my temp and PH for around 80 bucks, fine, I'm up for the challenge because how many people can say they have a self built and programed aquarium monitor.

Ok well maybe a lot of people can say that, but I am looking to those people for some guidance. If I want to view my temperature and possibly PH on a tiny little LCD screen. What do I need and how do I do it.

So far this is what I have (not physically, but what I am planing on getting):

• An Arduino Mega (or can I get away with an UNO)
• A breadboard
• 4.7k resistors
• Jumper cables

This is as far as I have gone. As far as hooking everything up goes this is my general understanding.

  • Put 5v and ground into the breadboard

  • Put temp probe into bread board with resistor between the positive current and data wire

  • put the jumper cables for the ground and positive into the power tracks

  • put the jumper cable for data cable to one of the analog pins on the board lets say A1

  • For the LCD display directly connect the 5v and ground to the power tracks on the breadboard with jumper

  • cables and connect the other outputs to the board with jumper cables. (there seems to be a pretty helpful review on Amazon about which ones you need vs. the ones you don't) (remember I want my LCD display detached from the mega itself so I have room for other stuff)

Programming

  • I have no idea

Alright, so I have just bored you to death with my explanation of a project that is still theoretical. To me it looks good on paper but will it really work?

Please help me out and if you know of any resources of me to take a look at, leave them down below.

Thank you so much for reading this incredibly long post,
Sincerely, jm18

P.S I Gave up with the number step stuff. Thats why everything is "1"

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Please help me out and if you know of any resources of me to take a look at, leave them down below.

Put aquarium in the search box in the upper right of this page and you will get a lot of previous discussions concerning aquariums.

3

get an arduino

get a water valve
a water temperateru sensor
a water level or water sensing unit
a heater that you can control.

play with the level control
you will have fun, get wet and learn a lot.

play with temperature control, you will kill lots of fish and have a great time.

by the time you have killed a couple dozen feeder fish/guppies, you will feel confident about risking your good tank.

it is a learning process

4

first step for you is to get arduino board. i dont think you need much bigger like mega, even UNO can do things well.
second step- go through examples given under arduino IDE. first examples like blink, fade, button are enough to teach you all you need for your project! all you need is to modify and copy those codes to suite your requirements!