Fish tank and Raspberry Pi

First of all, sorry if lately my posts are published less often than before, but I'm quite busy with several other things and my time for hobbies is quite limited...

Today I will show you a project made for request.

One friend have a small fish tank and he wished to make a really small system, just to check the temperature, pilot lights and few other things .

One Raspberry Pi model A+ was perfect to manage the fish tank with those features, so I decided to start this project and I finished it in few days.

Now this system has been named Aquarius and it's working as it was requested, with some small addition made by myself.

Adding a sensor zone to Sphaera

My Sphaera project is  nice and useful when used alone, but I designed it to be expandable quite easily by adding more Raspberry Pis to the LAN

Also, with the new extremely low cost Raspberry Pi Zero You can add several expansions at an affordable price without sacrifying system performance, as this new board has the same performances of an A+ model.

In this article I will show you just one example of configuration, but adding a new Raspberry Pi would be almost the same for any number of them.

It will be a short and surely not complete description, but could give you a starting point for building something similar. Anyway if you have some question about it, just ask.

Raspberry Pi and astronomy

This time I selected a topic a bit different from usual. After all the blog is about experiments and not only home automation, with RPi...

Since I was a child I've always loved astronomy. I own a small telescope and I took several photos with film cameras, but now I can go a step further thanks to my RPi.

Using AirPlay with Raspberry Pi

AirPlay is an Apple protocol which allows wireless streaming of audio, video, photo and so on. Even if it's a proprietary protocol, it can also be used with Android devices or personal computers by installing simple apps.

Of course you can also install AirPlay on a Raspberry Pi.

When I built my Sphaera, I also added an external audio card, an audio amplifier and a speaker. Initially I used this audio system just for some notification, but going from that to a wireless speaker it really easy.

Home automation server - Sphaera

When I showed you my RaPiRo some post ago I explained why I would not use it as a case for my home automation server.

Let's summarize just something...

First of all the power. 12 motors are quite "hungry" and this means that using batteries is not an option if you need to keep it active all the day. You need to power with a plug, so it's mobility would be greatly limited.

It's noisy. All that motors can be quite annoying.

It can detect movement, but only when it's not moving itself, so it can check just a small area at a time.

There are other cons, but these are enough to let me think about a different solution for my home automation server.

Raspberry Pi Robot (RaPiRo)

Ok, after spending almost a month doing many things not related to Raspberry Pi and home automation, I wish to  show one of the latest projects about RPi: RaPiRo (contraction of Raspberry Pi Robot).

This is a really nice small robot that can be 3d printed at home without too much trouble (if you wish you can also buy the full kit, but it will cost you much more).

By printing the shell and using many parts I had at home, I got this nice item at a really low cost.

But you may ask what this robot has to do with home automation.... Well, let's se how it could be used.

Checking devices connected to the LAN

One thing that could be useful is checking if a device is connected to your LAN at home.

This is a quite simple task and could be used for several goals, from sending you a Whatsapp greeting message when you arrive at home to inform you in case of undesired connection to your own wi-fi network.