you might think im crazy but,,...

[Intranick]

Well.. I have two hobbies.
1. Computers (of which i'm an expert)
and
2. Aquaria (of which im a newbie still as i know a fair amount a whole library of books couldnt teach you everything only experience)

now.. I have just won an auction of 3 computers on ebay of which will become my network of servers but ... i dont know for what, at least, for the 3rd.

One will be for services (SSH, HTTPd, etc), one will be for storage (samba, NFS, MySQL, etc).. but the third one.. I'd like to tie into an aquarium in some way shape or form and be able to monitor things to learn about it in ways books cant teach me.

Point is.. does anybody have anything I could do with it to benefit it all?

 

[Luukosian]

Sure, you could control any number of sensors, lights, pumps with that extra computer. There are commercially available aquarium controllers that you can hook up to your computer or you could build a microcontroller interface using serial or USB and a good chip that controls above mentioned devices and spits out a readout. Depending on what type of programming your into(im more of a fan of the straight hardware route than programming but...if a microcontroller is involved theres going to be some programming) we always used PBASIC in school and it seemed to be pretty straightforward.

Might be a waste of a good computer since it doesn't take much to run this kind of stuff but if you have one I say go for it....just make sure the board is powered by its own source and not the computer in case the computer crashes the chip can still do its thing(just wont put out readout).

If you don't have multiple lights, ph probe, multiple pumps you'd like to control, level sensor, temp sensor ect....it might not be worth the trouble.

I think I might be repeating myself....I think you had a thread similar to this didn't you?