Automatically measuring used/remaining water volume in ATO container

[Mandelstam]

I came by this by a chance and thought it could be a nice feature to implement in a ATO setup.

There's a diy arduino based controller for home brewers called Brewtroller and they utilize a quite neat way to measure the volume in the different pots and canisters they are using (sorry, I'm not a brewer myself). They use an air pump to very slowly trickle out air at the bottom of the container and teed off from that hose they put an air pressure sensor. Any change in water level will change the air pressure and with some math you can calculate the volume present in the tank.

(image source: https://brewtroller.com/pages/volume-measurement)

Reading their test results it's pretty dang accurate. How accurate depends on the surface area of the container though as it only measures the actual depth of water. I thought it could be a nice simple way of logging your ATO-levels and usage. Also, if you have a blacked out container where reading the level is not so easy you can print out the level on a little lcd-display or send it to your ReefPi maybe for logging and remote access? As I said I just came across this and haven't fully explored it's potential yet.

Absolutely not a MUST HAVE, but more a cool feature to implement if you already run a Arduino/Raspberry Pi controller/ATO unit.

Brewtroller is Arduino based and the code is open source so the code for this application is available for further reef implementation.

Read more: https://brewtroller.com/pages/volume-measurement

 

[jsker]

Cool read