Topic

Fish tanks are simple enough that even a child can maintain them. I don't have children yet to maintain my tank, but luckily my very patient wife has allowed me to explore over engineering a solution. In this talk we'll explore how python scripts running on a Raspberry Pi can be used to measure and control many aspects of maintaining a fish tank or any number of IOT applications. A demo of the hardware connectivity will be shown which includes an Atlas Scientific pH meter, digital submerged temperature probe, liquid flow meter, liquid level sensor, video camera, and an eight channel relay controlling 12V DC water and 120V AC CO2 gas solenoids, peristaltic dosing pumps, and lighting. A live python coding demo with sample scripts will show how to connect to the serial devices and control the analog and digital hardware. We will broadcast the measured data and hardware states using the Eclipse Paho MQTT python client with the IBM IoT Foundation on BlueMix or IBM MessageSight to create a dashboard using a Javascript MQTT client and Freeboard.io. Finally, we'll create a linux script which allows the attached RaspiCam to live stream a HD video to Google's Youtube Live so the whole world can see.