njo
05/14/2002, 09:47 PM
Hi all,
Myself and another guy have started a project with pretty much the same goals as yours. I had the idea to build a controller, he had the same (but he's doing his for a senior design project).
Here's the rundown:
- For the microcontroller, we've chosen the Rabbit 2000 series. Fast, cheap, lots of features. Website: www.rabbitsemiconductor.com
- I just registered our project with SourceForge, under "OpenAquarium". Should have the approval soon from the SF guys, and then we'll have a mailing list, forums, and webpage. Might I suggest that you guys do the same?
- We have made some good progress with sensors. I've decided to standardize on the 4-20mA current loop, because it's widespread and easy to find parts that use it. To date, I've purchased two electromagnetic flowmeters and a pH controller. Shopping for a flow-through pH electrode, and am figuring out a good way to measure bicarbonate and carbonate. Haven't found any ISEs for bicarbonate yet, but I know they exist for carbonate. Need this to control calcium reactor.
- Our interface will be over Ethernet. This is another beautiful thing about the Rabbit - the core board comes with built in Ethernet and 512K of flash and battery-backed SRAM. All the TCP/IP libraries are already there, which make it *easy*. We may use raw sockets to log to a machine running the mySQL database and have a PHP web application for status/control. May also be coding a webserver for the Rabbit itself that would mitigate the need for a standalone websever - the controller itself would be up on the web.
Now, I don't know where our projects overlap, and where they don't, but it seems that the different choice of microcontroller is a sticky issue, and would make sharing controller source code difficult. However, there is no reason that you guys couldn't make your VB client compatible with our controller, and our PHP application would be compatible with yours if you wrote a daemon to log to the mySQL database from your serial interface.
It also wouldn't hurt to share algorithms - in particular control algorithms are pretty complex and if someone comes up with, a particularly good integrating algorithm for controlling somethingorother, it'd be a good idea to share.
What do you all think? Comments? Questions? Post them here or contact me directly at: openaquariumATodle.biz (replace AT with @ please)
-Nathan
Myself and another guy have started a project with pretty much the same goals as yours. I had the idea to build a controller, he had the same (but he's doing his for a senior design project).
Here's the rundown:
- For the microcontroller, we've chosen the Rabbit 2000 series. Fast, cheap, lots of features. Website: www.rabbitsemiconductor.com
- I just registered our project with SourceForge, under "OpenAquarium". Should have the approval soon from the SF guys, and then we'll have a mailing list, forums, and webpage. Might I suggest that you guys do the same?
- We have made some good progress with sensors. I've decided to standardize on the 4-20mA current loop, because it's widespread and easy to find parts that use it. To date, I've purchased two electromagnetic flowmeters and a pH controller. Shopping for a flow-through pH electrode, and am figuring out a good way to measure bicarbonate and carbonate. Haven't found any ISEs for bicarbonate yet, but I know they exist for carbonate. Need this to control calcium reactor.
- Our interface will be over Ethernet. This is another beautiful thing about the Rabbit - the core board comes with built in Ethernet and 512K of flash and battery-backed SRAM. All the TCP/IP libraries are already there, which make it *easy*. We may use raw sockets to log to a machine running the mySQL database and have a PHP web application for status/control. May also be coding a webserver for the Rabbit itself that would mitigate the need for a standalone websever - the controller itself would be up on the web.
Now, I don't know where our projects overlap, and where they don't, but it seems that the different choice of microcontroller is a sticky issue, and would make sharing controller source code difficult. However, there is no reason that you guys couldn't make your VB client compatible with our controller, and our PHP application would be compatible with yours if you wrote a daemon to log to the mySQL database from your serial interface.
It also wouldn't hurt to share algorithms - in particular control algorithms are pretty complex and if someone comes up with, a particularly good integrating algorithm for controlling somethingorother, it'd be a good idea to share.
What do you all think? Comments? Questions? Post them here or contact me directly at: openaquariumATodle.biz (replace AT with @ please)
-Nathan