"Fish Sense"

A Monitoring and Control System for Aquariums

- By Braden Trigg, Sebastien Robitaille, Kayleb Stetsko, and Eric Samer

Keeping fishes and invertebrates in captivity is always a challenge because so many critical environmental factors need to be carefully controlled. Using ESP32s, CAN Bus, MQTT, and Ethernet, these four Camosun College students developed “Fish Sense,” a modular, expandable method of monitoring conditions in a home aquarium, automatically notifying the aquarium keeper when something goes awry, and even correcting some problems.

Keeping aquatic life aive in an aquarium is an exercise in frustration tolerance—there’s always something going wrong. The challenge is finding the problem in time, and balancing the ecosystem before things begin cascading in the wrong direction. Otherwise, before you know it, you're stuck with whatever living creatures you've managed to save, living out of sight in the aquarium’s sump tank, while you attempt to figure out what to do with 85 gallons of dirty saltwater (Figure 1)—not to mention the hours draining and refilling the tank can take.

Kayleb has been keeping fish and corals for most of his life, and is aware of the many struggles associated with aquariums, having had to reset his tank multiple times. Saltwater aquariums are far more complex than freshwater systems, especially for growing corals. They can require a secondary “sump” tank (Figure 2) to act as a refugium—somewhere that delicate algae and other organisms that serve as food can reproduce. As filter feeders, corals that are housed in the display tank need a constant current in the water to enable them to feed on the organisms from the sump tank. Also, to truly thrive, corals require lighting and a narrow range of water quality parameters—including temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and pH.