Reef-PI Build on NAno

[Julio Abreu]

Hey Guys,

 

I'm new to the forum and a "legacy" hobbyist. I shut down my last saltwater aquarium more than 10 years ago in Brazil. But now that I'm leaving in US and with all the pandemic-stress I decided to go back to the Reef world with a nano. I started a Fluval Evo XII with standard configuration about a month ago. Its doing pretty well and I already have a little ocellaris as well as some soft corals.

But as my other hobby is DIY and I'm a IT professional I decided to just blend everything together and bring some automation to the reef! 😀

 

So after some experimentation with Arduino and some research, I decided to move forward with a Raspberry PI based project as this controller/micro-computer offers everything I need like wifi, video outputs, and can run a webserver.

 

Also, I dont want to reinvent the wheel, so I decided to leverage as much as possible from the Open source Reef-pi.  Its a very well maintained project with lots of material available on-line. The main author, Ranjib Dey have also very good Tutorials like this one:

 

https://learn.adafruit.com/reef-pi-installation-and-configuration

 

I will be posting the advance of the build here to share and mainly to get your feedbacks and inputs.

 

For now I have already configured the software and implemented a temperature sensor. So let me start by that.

 

Material so far:

 

Raspberry PI 4B 2GB RAM (you can use other versions, I just went with the latest one... you know, Im an IT Nerd 😁) - 35.00 USD from Adafruit https://www.adafruit.com/product/4292

 

 

Protoboard and Jumper wires - Less than 10.00 USD on Ebay

 

Temperature Sensor Kit - 8.99 on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087JQ6MCP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 - Strongly recommend this one as it comes with the required resistor so you dont need to solder anything (I hate soldering).

 

After the wiring (very simple to do using jumper cables) and doing the initial configuration on the software, I'm already monitoring the temperature:

 

 

The prototype connected to the thank:

 

 

And the actual monitoring of temperature:

 

 

 

 

 

If you are interested, I will keep you posted!

Also, please share your inputs and feedbacks!

 

 

[Robbie_Maxwell]

Any updates?