"Roll your own" Automation

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Salsiccia

Salsiccia

0
Nov 28, 2015
208
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Random fun project has just occurred to me and I'm wondering if its occurred to anyone else as well.

I want to start playing around with electronics / software projects like Raspberry Pi and Arduino.
(If you're of a technical bent and love gadgets and don't know what these are, Google them)

I thought I'd start by building a wifi enabled waterproof thermometer to float in the pool and regularly send temp readings to my pool data spreadsheet in the house.
Should be doable and a bit of fun.

Have any of you folks had a go at this?
What did you build?
 
Giggle if you do it.....:scratch: if I were to try LOL

A long while ago a fella use the raspberry pi to make lighted jets. It went great and was fun to watch him learn along the way. Of course I cannot find the thread LOL
 
Some discussion on this forum and others about this type of DIY project. Search on github.com and hackster.io for “pool controller” and you will get quite a few hits hits. Some of those projects are members of this forum. I am in the midst of implementing a new controller (like you just for fun) and here are a couple that have been great inspiration for me:

Automated Pool Controller

Pool Fill Control - Hackster.io

Have fun!
 
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Definitely some really good ideas in those posts you provided Jon. Interestingly following them through in more detail on a couple of occasions they lead back to TFP with some typically detailed discussion on the merits (or otherwise) of the ORP monitoring. I wish I was intelligent enough to fully appreciate the knowledge that ChemGeek shares. At least I know that while I may not understand it, I can take it as read that he's correct !! I've already got ideas for how to add more to this now.
 
Good luck on your adventure! I wish you'd master it and manufacture it for folks like me who just wish we had a good thermometer to view temps from the house!
I bought a cheap bluetooth one but it rarely worked. I think being that my pool is quite low in my yard or far from the house it never could get the bluetooth signal...yet our wireless works great down near the pool when we're on laptops. Go figure?

Another issue is the robot kept eating it or we'd find it had floated into the skimmer. Find some way to fix that!

There ya go....future sideline gig for your retirement. :)

Thanks. Will be waiting for delivery....in a few years, huh?

Maddie :flower:
 
YippeeSkippy said:
I wish you'd master it and manufacture it for folks like me who just wish we had a good thermometer to view temps from the house!
Click to expand...

Maddie, I am more than happy to chat about building one for you - I've taken so much from this wonderful community it would be great to give back.

Obviously I need to test this out on myself first and my plans have evolved a bit just in 24 hours. Current approach that I'm planning to take looks like this:
- Acquire one of those floating chlorine tablet dispenser things. (I have no need for one as my pool is salt).
- Mount my new temp probe inside that, with the electronic bits housed inside a waterproof container because they won't like water and certainly won't like salt water.
- I plan to power it from a small rechargeable battery and I'm now thinking I'll pop a small solar panel on the top of the unit to top up the battery so its basically free power.

Future enhancement - maybe add a pH probe into the same container so I can get pH numbers as well.

I happen to be an IT guy so I can report that bluetooth and wifi are totally different technologies. The range on wifi is much better than on bluetooth which has quite a short range so I'm not surprised your experience reflected that.
My solution is going to be wifi, not bluetooth so if you have a wifi signal at your pool that's good enough for your laptops, chances are this solution could work too. Ultimately it will come down to the quality of wifi antenna and chip in my solution as I need to keep power draw as low as possible to maximise battery life, which potentially means compromising signal strength of the wifi, but you never know. These are all things I will be learning over the coming days and weeks.

Stay tuned - you never know - and hopefully it won't take a few years !!!
 

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