As part of my interest in aquaponics I’ve always intended to enable some kind of electronic monitoring, various thoughts on what to monitor and how have been in my head for a while. Recently I’ve been wondering if the temperature levels of the water are high enough so this was as good a place as any to start.
An Arduino was my obvious choice to start with, I built various circuits but soon decided that I wouldn’t be running Ethernet anywhere near and that kind of ruled it out with regards to re-using existing kit. I decided to use one of the nodeMCU devices I’m halfway through a project on (I’ll just buy another couple eventually).
Having previously used LUA script on the devices, I decided to use the Arduino method instead this time, mainly to investigate the OTA options now available. I’d already built up some perf board based shields to house a connector to a DS18B20 temperature sensor, so I just added some female headers to one of the waterproof sensors I have lying around and hey presto.
I have power near the tank so I’ve opted for an always on solution with a permanent supply, rather than power from batteries and have to worry about charge cycles. WiFi connection works perfectly outdoors too.
I will be publishing the sketch on GitHub shortly (watch here for an edit), just need to tidy up a little. But essentially it reads the temp every 10 seconds and publishes to an MQTT topic, fairly simple for now but I do plan on adding more sensors for humidity, greenhouse temperature and possibly others such as luminosity and maybe barometric pressure and pH. For now though I have enough to get me going and also have the data of interest.
The data itself just goes to an MQTT stream, but I’ve developed a simple web front end using jquery to show a simple gauge. I have also used the script at https://github.com/irvined1982/MQTT2RRD to generate rrd information to form rrd graphs which can actually be seen in the sidebar on this site.
Great data for now.
Here’s a couple of pics of the device and the probe in the water.
