Hi,
I'm really new to Arduino, but I've been doing a little work with a friend on an Arduino-controlled aquarium system, and it's given me lots of ideas, although I'm not sure they're feasible, especially at my skill level. This particular idea involves building a series of submersible water quality monitoring stations to deploy in a river. I'd like to think I can to this relatively cheaply (ideally <$500 per station), but I'd love any feedback from the community about feasibility, component recommendations, coding, etc. It seems like someone must have tried this before, but I just haven't found it yet. Here's the rundown of what I am looking for my monitoring stations to do:
- Record temperature, dissolved oxygen and salinity at hourly intervals
- Associate each reading with actual time and date
- Store at least a month's worth of data, and have data retrieval be straightforward (and easy to view in excel)
- Have at least a month of battery life
- Be as compact and streamlined as possible, so it can fit in a waterproof capsule and not create a ton of drag
I've been looking at a lot of the components from Atlas Scientific, including their D.O. and conductivity probes and their temperature sensor, as well as their data logger (or maybe an SD card would be better for storage?). Iowa Aquaponics seems to have some nice code snippets for this stuff, but maybe someone here has tried this before. Also, my aquarium project is connected to main power, so I have zero experience with battery power, especially making sure it will last long enough, and I'm still figuring out how real-time clocks work, which I assume is the best way to get timestamps with my data.
I'd really like to hear peoples' opinions about whether this is do-able, and any other thoughts you might have.
Thanks!
Adam