The 12V power supply just arrived. No to start putting the cables and connectors together. Also, I have the components for a Peltier Cooling system so looking forward to see if this will all work properly to reduce the water temperature as I pump water through the manifold.
A little bit of thermal paste later, some zip tie’s to clamp the heatsink and manifold to the Peltier coolers and we have something to begin with.
And this would be no fun without being able to watch the temp change as I pumped water through the manifold; so I went ahead and added a hole for the temp sensor and wrote an Arduino sketch to read the temp.
And, adding the code to github here
So, after starting the pump, plugging in the cooling unit, and watching the temperatures I realize this was just a start. The whole thing looks like it needs to be reconstructed due to the way the top tier is unsecured and it being made with a plastic soda bottle. I wanted to increase the vortex action, so I drilled a larger hole in the bottle cap. Now the water drains as soon as it enters the top.
The Peltier cooler works, and I could feel the water being refrigerated by touch. Unfortunately I can only cool the water about a minute before the heat side of the device gets very hot. I need to cool the hot side much better; bigger heat sinks, larger fans, etc…
I am also concerned about the quality of temp/ph meter I am using. I need to test everything for a longer duration. I am thinking of ways to log the data, and visualize everything. Possibly a display for the tank, and perhaps data communication to acomodate a database.
Still, things are working as well as expected. I placed a glass aquarium in the styrofoam box to deal with the water seeping through ($30 from the local fish store). I think I did enough for the day and look forward to improving all the different aspects of this first prototype. I shall receive the PH-up and PH-down solution any day and will test the paristaltice pumps soon.
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