Well, I started this project back in 2003 with the intention to go commercial and make a living out of it. That didn't happen. What did happen was, I almost completed the project and then things in life got interesting, as they always do. I have not abandoned the project, but am no longer interested in pursuing it commercially. So I have finally decided to make it open source. There's a good 10+ years of development here already. I have ported the code through four embedded C languages. It is very portable code as I have made use of virtually no libraries whatsoever. All necessary functions are written into the code.
So what does it do? Being a biologist working in an aquarium, I did the natural thing and built it to control aquarium parameters. At the time, in 2003, there was not much of this type of thing banging around. Now, in the maker years since arduino hit the scene, the situation is completely different. The original project included a custom PCB circuit holding the microcontroller, control logic, display, and other items. The software side of things was carefully planned and structured in a way similar to a PLC operating system. It is modular and easily upgradeable.
So now what? I would really like to see this project brought into the light, and proted over to the arduino platform for all makers to toy with. The project has been coded with reliability in mind, after all, there are living animals depending on it functioning correctly. My prototype controller has been running my home marine tank with SPS corals in it for over 5 years, and I only encountered one stupid memory leak caused by an unassigned pointer (the usual problem encountered in embedded design) that I easily fixed. It has been flawless otherwise and I often forget it is even there doing its job. I would like to see this same level of reliability maintained when it is ported over to an open source platform.
I will post the project on GitHub as soon as I have a spare moment from my thesis, and I figure out how GitHub works.
Built With
- mplab-c
- pic18
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