Node-red based Aquarium Controller

The development of the Reefmate continues at full speed and we are pleased to announce an amazing new feature, the integration with Nodered, “A visual tool for wiring the Internet of Things”.
We put a lot of thinking to make the Reefmate easy to use, so you don’t have to think when using it. Doh?! Yet we understand that every tank is different and it is important to let expert users to modify the controller’s behaviour and extend it beyond our thoughts. At the same time, we didn’t want to replicate what existing products do with complicated programming languages (Neptune Apex with their embedded scripts and Reef Angel with Arduino code). Our goal was to come up with something simple, that non-programmer could use, visually rich and drag-and-drop based.

With Nodered and Reefmate’s customs “Nodes” you can easily read the value from sensors, apply some custom logic and drive an “actuator”.
The image below is the example of a flow, that doses 10ml of Calcium, every day at 08:00, updates the Control Panel UI and notifies a MQTT.

Node-red Dosing pump controller flow

“The possibilities are endless and creativity is the limit”

Let’s analyse some other examples and possibilities. Changes in photo-period, temperature, current and moon phases are well know for triggering Corals propagation, so let’s create some flow to simulate mother nature.

Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 5.19.57 pm

Since most of my corals come from the Great Barrier Reef, I might want to associate my light schedule to that region and simulate its photo-period. Firstly, I picked a Sun rise/set web service from the tool bar as my input. Secondly, Cairn sunset is around 6AM, but I want my tank lights to turn on a bit later, so I added a 4 hours Delay. Lastly, I picked a node to Turn ON/OFF the lights, which will drive the power outlet where the lights are connected. Obviously, we could use a more advanced flow to ramp up and down LED lights and I intentionally made it simple for simplicity.
The result is a light scheme that changes along the year.

 

How about moon phases? Coming soon…