Automate Your Fish Tank with This Raspberry Pi-Powered Controller
The Robo-Tank provides the hardware for reef-pi aquarium setups.
Reef-pi is an open source program for the Raspberry Pi, which lets you monitor and control various aquarium implements. While it’s been under development for more than three years, and is presumably pretty good, the question after you install everything becomes, “How do you actually hook it up?” Well now there’s a ready-made solution funding on Kickstarter for both freshwater or reef tanks, in the form of the Robo-Tank flexible aquarium controller.
This device comes in both a “standard” and “deluxe” flavor, enabling your Pi to control things like dosing and water pumps, LED strip lights, valves, cooling fans, and fish feeders (with a bit of hacking). To do this correctly, the Robo-Tank can take in information from a wide range of sensors, and features a special remote extension module for optical sensors and an emergency float switch.
The Robo-Tank can also include an 8-outlet AC strip — or this can be obtained on its own — allowing the Pi-based system, or even an Arduino board, to turn any appliance on as needed.
The project is available in a variety of configurations starting at pledge levels of $49 CAD (~$36 USD) up to $206 CAD (~$152 USD) for all the bells and whistles. You’ll, of course, need to provide the actual aquarium, but this will give you an awesome semi-DIY way to automate it!
