Other Projects: The Seneye USB Forwarder via Raspberry Pi.

I'm a reef aquarium keeper. In fact I used to run a business propagating and selling aquacultured live coral. Expensive, time consuming hobbies have been a bit of a problem for me, and that one started the morning after a night that involved way too much alcohol. No regrets really.

I'm by no means good at it. In fact these past couple of years I've struggled with it. Struggled with motivation, struggled with algae. It's an ongoing battle that one day I will perhaps overcome. I had success early that lasted years due to discipline and a lot of time and effort. Then I ran short on time and the frustration that most people start with (and usually leave due to) and the wheels fell off.

As a side note, my reef keeping journey has involved some great electronics projects. I started at a time when LED lighting was becoming popular amongst the new generation of reef keepers. There were few commercial units, and fewer suppliers of tightly controlled BINs that would ensure that the LEDs were in the exact temperature we needed them. 

I quickly started out building my own LED lights. They were connected to PWM controllers that were basically early Arduinos with a display and the required buttons. Everything good was imported from the US.  As I went into business and my tanks multiplied, so did the quantity of lights. 

Then other projects came into play - float switches with relays to cut off 240v water pumps just to name one of the more dodgy variety. 

It was fun. There was also a lot of plumbing involved. 

Since we finally moved into our own place and I no longer needed to up end everything every couple of years and I've long since gone back to a single reef tank, I decided to refresh all of the electronics bar the main pump which was relatively new (and expensive) due to a warranty claim. 

There isn't much in it that is DIY this time. Nice, compact, energy efficient LED lights - high end with decent power supplies and good controllers. 12v water pumps. New live rock. But still the algae problems despite there being no obvious reason for phosphates to be high beyond leaching from the rock that was base rock when I started it a couple of years ago.

I have a Seneye Reef - a basic USB driven monitor that checks temperature, pH, ammonia and a couple of other levels of minor relevance in the grand scheme of things. This device uses a slide that has to be replaced monthly. I don't care too much for running it all the time. The cost adds up, and the data is mostly useless, but still, it will send me an SMS if the temperature is out of whack or if it detects ammonia. When I make major changes, such as the massive dose of fluconozole I've just thrown in however it's good to know what is going on. The addition of this medication required me to remove the contents of the refugium - a space in the sump normally full of macroalgaes that absorb a lot of the crap in the tank, and runs on an alternate cycle to reduce pH swings in the water. Without that present, the water chemistry changes. Adding something to kill algae also changes the chemistry.  Simply - it's useful to know what is going on. In reefing, nothing good happens fast. Bad things however can happen very quickly.

This device requires a PC or a rather expensive little webserver device. I've never been able to bring myself to buy the web server. It's too rich for my blood. I'd hoped over the years that someone would pull the source code and make it available. That hasn't happened. I've had PCs sitting up next to the tank to run it - all burning stupid amounts of power for not much. Currently, I use a USB over Ethernet adapter to get the USB into ethernet on the wall that leads back to the study and connects to a PC.  It's not reliable. I suspect that there is too much loss over the cable length at such low voltage. I could get around it by putting in a powered USB hub, but that's a 50/50 thing.

FWIW: I'd previously done this back to a virtual server via a shared USB port on my server however it was prone to causing the hypervisor to lock up. 

I recently decided to get back into doing something about all of this, and discovered   http://www.ma55ey.co.uk/2015/04/using-raspberry-pi-as-remote-seneye.html

I like it - it's simple. Use a Raspberry Pi and an app that can forward the USB device back to your PC. The Seneye is a Windows centric device, so this idea makes sense. I had toyed with the option of trying to retrofit an ARM based Windows 10 on there and seeing how I'd go, but to be honest, I have better things to do with my time than shoehorn Windows into something it will run slowly on. 

It also means that I still need to have a Windows PC for it to connect to. Those choices are my work laptop (bad, and has one USB port), or the radio PC which is already overloaded with USB... and I'm also passing a Serial-USB adapter across to line to the UPS on the aquarium. The Radio PC really doesn't need yet another Serial-USB interface. I'm having enough trouble keeping up with the COM ports, and I've been dealing with them for 30 years. 

This setup, if it works will allow me to have it interface with a virtual PC that will run the Seneye Connect client. I don't need to interact with it, which is good. I don't want to. I just need it to talk to the Internet. 

There are kits available for about $75 on eBay that have everything I need. That suits me nicely. And best of all, it's low power drag and small. Suggestions are that it's between 1 and 3 watts. I certainly cannot keep a dedicated PC running for that. Hopefully I should have this kit ordered in a week or so and get it done. 

Trying to keep the power consumption down is a major consideration these days - my hobbies consume a lot of it and the power bills are only growing, so it's necessary to keep finding ways to reduce power consumption without loosing functionality that I need and still being able to do those things that I enjoy. 

This won't be my first Pi. I have a Pi zero - a cheap DMR hotspot that I had to put together in order to use. It's normally off as I really haven't found the motivation to play with DMR once I set it up.