So as some of you may have guessed with the gaps between postings I have way too many hobbies. One of them includes aquariums. I only do freshwater stuff but I do more than “a goldfish in a bowl”. Really I mainly focus on plants, shrimp, and a few not really extreme fish that are deemed compatible with the shrimp. The plants need lots of light to make them grow which is why most people can’t keep aquarium plants alive. The shrimp pick at the base of the plants pulling away the dead parts and look cool.
Several months ago I had some setbacks with some shrimp and some illnesses that came in with them. I’ve decided to start over and build a setup that is designed to keep all of the conditions very solid that was hard to do in the “nano tank” that I had been using. This resulted in ordering a new tank that came with a matching size stand that was unfinished. I had to sand, finish, and assemble a stand and I’ve been throwing together a bunch of automated controllers that monitoring a variety of probes and adjust things…. not much different than controlling conditions in a coffee roaster. Eventually I’ll be building my own control system for it and I’ll be selling off the existing control system that I’m installing just to get it running.
There is obviously value in “get it done now” vs building it yourself. There is always a cost to results ratio that needs met to justify buying something or doing it yourself. I think a lot of the coffee roasting world in the DIY arena operates in this world. For people who cannot do it themselves and insist on programmability etc there are 800-900 dollar roaster systems. For everyone else there is 150-500 dollar roasting setups. Finally for those that want to make a 900 dollar roasting system on their own there’s Arduino and other micro controllers and the $9.99 Poppery roaster to the $200 random brand entry level roaster.
Anyway, I’m at a stage with the roaster that I need to hook up relays to cycle the heating systems on and off. I’m probably going to order a second SR500 base from a site I found on the internet to take apart completely and splice these relays into it for the microcontroller to cycle. I’m pondering the 3 stages of heat from the selector switch and actually cycling the power to the heater element. I need to check some voltage readings from inside the roaster once I take it apart and decide if I want my controller sending signals in place of the switch to vary the desired heat status or just control the heater. It might be easier to try controlling the fan speed first from my controller and then come back to the heater later.
For the moment I need to finish the fish tank stuff. This weekend I’m trying to finish the under tank plumbing and then get the tank up on the stand. The tank is an 18x18x18 25 gallon glass tank (no plastic, only a silicone seal between the glass). I’m using a Neptune System Apex Controller underneath and am running all the sensors into the plumbing underneath. The light on top is a 70 watt Metal Halide and the I’ve got CO2 gas bubbled into the plumbing based on the pH. The entire thing gets logged and can be graphed onto a device web page. I’m using an Eheim Ecco canister filter and running the output through a UV sterilizer, inline heater, and the CO2 reactor. Later (once I get the right fittings) I’m mounting a IceProbe chiller inline through some plumbing as well. I need to modify it with different fans to push air from inside the enclosure through the heat sink and then vent it out of the tank rather than blowing air down onto the heat sink. The fan is pretty noisy so I’ll be replacing it with fans used to make super silent computer vent fans and running a series of small ones along the sides blowing inward and one large one up top to suck outward that will pass through the base enclosure wall.
I’m kind of discouraged in the coffee world right now. Mainly I’ve been waiting for a good Ethiopian coffee to come in but this year has not been a good year for coffee. I’m trying to figure out what else I want to try as my “base” coffee for the ongoing roasting experiments. I really need to have a base to compare one roast to the next as I adjust the programming on the controller rather than having different beans roast after roast. I just havent found anything I want to drink week after week while I work out the kinks.